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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 singular 'they'. In many languages, such as French , the verb in any given tense takes a different suffix for any of the various combinations of person and number of the subject.
Examples of such languages include French, where the singular tu is used only for familiars, the plural vous being used as a singular in other cases (Russian follows a similar pattern); German, where the third-person plural sie (capitalized as Sie) is used as both singular and plural in the second person in non-familiar uses; and Polish, where ...
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 third-person singular forms are differentiated according to the gender of the referent. For example, she is used to refer to a female person, sometimes a female animal, and sometimes an object to which female characteristics are attributed, such as a ship or a country.
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. [140] For "you", the singular reflexive pronoun (" yourself ") is different from its plural reflexive pronoun (" yourselves "); with "they" one can hear either ...
The first person plural form and pronoun (nous) are now usually replaced by the pronoun on (literally: "one") and a third person singular verb form in Modern French. Thus, nous travaillons (formal) becomes on travaille. In most verbs from the other conjugations, each person in the plural can be distinguished among themselves and from the ...
English has three persons (first, second and third) and two numbers (singular and plural); in the third person singular there are also distinct pronoun forms for male, female and neuter gender. [2]: 52–53 Principal forms are shown in the adjacent table. English personal pronouns have two cases, subject and object.
One is an English language, gender-neutral, indefinite pronoun that means, roughly, "a person". For purposes of verb agreement it is a third-person singular pronoun, though it sometimes appears with first- or second-person reference.