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I am (first-person singular) you are/thou art (second-person singular) he, she, one, it is (third-person singular) we are (first-person plural) you are/ye are (second-person plural) they are (third-person plural, and third-person singular) Other verbs in English take the suffix -s to mark the present tense third person singular, excluding ...
Although the everyday meaning of plural is "more than one", the grammatical term has a slightly different technical meaning. In the English system of grammatical number, singular means "one (or minus one)", and plural means "not singular". In other words, plural means not just "more than one" but also "less than one (except minus one)".
In languages with a singular/dual/plural paradigm, the exact meaning of plural depends on whether the dual is obligatory or facultative (optional). [16] In contrast to English and other singular/plural languages where plural means two or more, in languages with an obligatory dual, plural strictly means three or more.
first-person pronouns normally refer to the speaker, in the case of the singular (as the English I), or to the speaker and others, in the case of the plural (as the English we). second-person pronouns normally refer to the person or persons being addressed (as the English you); in the plural they may also refer to the person or persons being ...
Examples of plural forms are the French mangeons, mangez, mangent – respectively the first-, second- and third-person plural of the present tense of the verb manger. In English a distinction is made in the third person between forms such as eats (singular) and eat (plural).
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 ...
The singular and plural use of they can be compared with the pronoun you, which had been both a plural and polite singular, but by the 18th century replaced thou for singular referents. [141] For "you", the singular reflexive pronoun (" yourself ") is different from its plural reflexive pronoun (" yourselves "); with "they" one can hear either ...
Old English had a single third-person pronoun hē, which had both singular and plural forms, and they wasn't among them. In or about the start of the 13th century, they was imported from a Scandinavian source (Old Norse þeir, Old Danish, Old Swedish þer, þair), in which it was a masculine plural demonstrative pronoun.