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The Oxford English Dictionary dates written examples of calling ships she to at least 1308 (in the Middle English period), in materials translated from French, which has grammatical gender. [19] One modern source claims that ships were treated as masculine in early English, and that this changed to feminine by the sixteenth century.
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
Second-language learners are often encouraged to memorize a modifier, usually a definite article, in conjunction with each noun—for example, a learner of French may learn the word for "chair" as la chaise (meaning "the chair"); this carries the information that the noun is chaise, and that it is feminine (because la is the feminine singular ...
Partitive article: du, de la, des; Possessives (for the first person singular): mon, ma, mes; Demonstratives: ce, cette, ces; Notice that some of the above also change (in the singular) if the following word begins with a vowel: le and la become l′, du and de la become de l′, ma becomes mon (as if the noun were masculine) and ce becomes cet.
Historically, she was encompassed in he as he had three genders in Old English. The neuter and feminine genders split off during Middle English. Today, she is the only feminine pronoun in English. She is occasionally used as a gender neutral, third-person, singular pronoun (see also singular they). [1]: 492
Middle English personal pronouns Below each Middle English pronoun, the Modern English is shown in italics (with archaic forms in parentheses) Person / gender Subject Object Possessive determiner Possessive pronoun Reflexive; Singular First ic / ich / I I: me / mi me: min / minen [pl.] my: min / mire / minre mine: min one / mi seluen myself: Second
While the usual pronouns of “He,” “She” or even “They” are used to describe whether someone is masculine or feminine, the use of neopronouns may “express a person’s identity in a ...
Though in English the possessive determiners indicate definiteness, in other languages the definiteness needs to be added separately for grammatical correctness. In Norwegian the phrase "my book" would be boka mi, [11] where boka is the definite form of the feminine noun bok (book), and mi (my) is the possessive pronoun following feminine ...