The English language once had an extensive declension system similar to Latin, modern German or Icelandic. Old English distinguished between the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive cases; and for strongly declined adjectives and some pronouns also a separate instrumental case (which otherwise and later completely coincided with the dative). Declension was greatly simplified during the Middle English period, when accusative and dative pronouns merged into a single objective pronoun. Nouns in Modern English no longer decline for case, except in a sense for possessive, and for remnants of the former system in a few pronouns.

"Who" and "whom", "he" and "him", "she" and "her", etc. are remnants of both the old nominative versus accusative and also of nominative versus dative. In other words, "her" (for example) serves as both the dative and accusative version of the nominative pronoun "she". In Old English as well as modern German and Icelandic as further examples, these cases had distinct pronouns.

This collapse of the separate case pronouns into the same word is one of the reasons grammarians consider the dative and accusative cases to be extinct in English — neither is an ideal term for the role played by "whom". Instead, the term objective is often used; that is, "whom" is a generic objective pronoun which can describe either a direct or an indirect object. The nominative case, "who", is called simply the subjective. The information formerly conveyed by having distinct case forms is now mostly provided by prepositions and word order.

Modern English morphologically distinguishes only one case, the possessive case — which some linguists argue is not a case at all, but a clitic (see the entry for genitive case for more information). With only a few pronominal exceptions, the objective and subjective always have the same form.

Old English personal pronouns

Evolution of the English pronouns

Interrogative pronouns

Old masculine/feminine to the modern person

¹ - Most generally speaking, in non-subject rules: "whom" is used in "formal" situations and in writing, while "who? is colloquial or "informal". A dialectal investigation should be taken into consideration, of course.

Old neuter to the modern thing

¹ - Usually replaced by of what (postpositioned).

First person personal pronouns

Singular

Plural

(from it.)

Second person personal pronouns

n.b. þ is a letter from Old English, roughly corresponding to th.

Old and Middle English singular to the Modern English archaic informal

Old and Middle English plural to the archaic formal to the modern general

Note that the ye/you distinction still existed, at least optionally, in Early Modern English: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" from the King James Bible.

Formal and informal forms of the second person singular and plural

(Old English also had a separate dual, ?it ("ye two") etcetera; however, no later forms derive from it.)

Third person personal pronouns

Feminine singular

Masculine singular

Neuter singular

Plural

(For the origin of the modern forms, also cf. the demonstrative pronouns.)

See also

• Old English declension

External links

• Peter S. Baker. 'Pronouns'. In Peter S. Baker. The Electronic Introduction to Old English. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, c. 5.
• The Magic Sheet, one page color PDF summarizing Old English declension

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