He

"He" (IPAEng|hiː) is a
third-person,
singular
personal pronoun (subject case) in Modern English.

Usage

People

He can be used as a substitution of a male's name.

Animals

Grammatically, it is most often incorrect to use the pronouns "he" or "she" when referring to animals, with the neuter "it" being more correct.Fact|date=October 2008 However, they are both often used colloquially to refer to animals of the appropriate gender.

Generic

Other

The pronoun He, with a universally capitalized H is often used to refer to God.

Gender

The gender system in Modern English is generally "natural", "semantic" and "logical", however it is most similar to languages whose gender systems primarily distinguish between the animate and inanimate, and between the personal and impersonal. [Randolf Sidney Quirk, Geoffrey Greenbaum and Ian Svartvik, "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language", (London: Longman, 1985), p. 314.] In the table "RP" stands for "relative pronoun" and "PP" for "personal pronoun".

Etymology

Indo-European

The reconstructed Indo-European language provides a demonstrative pronoun "ko". [ [http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE233.html 'Ko'] , "The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language", Fourth edition, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000).]

Germanic

English is a development of the West Germanic language family.

Old English

Speakers of Old English (OE) considered each noun to have a grammatical gender — masculine, feminine or neuter. [Peter S Baker, [http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/index.html "Introduction to Old English"] , (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).] Pronouns were generally (but not always) [Greville Corbett, "Gender", (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).] selected to have the same grammatical gender as the noun they referred to. For example, "dæg" (IPA2|dæj, "day") was masculine, so a masculine pronoun was used when referring to a day or days. The personal pronoun for a singular masculine subject was written "he", just like Present-Day English (PrDE). However, OE "he" was probably pronounced like PrDE "hay" (IPA2|he:). The vowel in "hay" is normally longer in duration than in the exlamation "Hey!" (IPA2|he). Because the vowel sound of OE "he" was long in duration, scholars (and OE dictionaries) now write it as "hē".

Middle English

There was one change to the inflection of the masculine pronoun in Middle English. The OE dative form "him" replaced the OE accusative "hine" (IPA2|hine). This meant that, in Middle English, there was no distinction between masculine and impersonal, except in the subject case of the third-person singular, until "it" from "hit" replaced "him" in the object case of the impersonal. So, "there was rather an extended period of time in the history of the English language when the choice of a supposedly masculine personal pronoun ("him") said nothing about the gender or sex of the referent." [cite paper|title=Gender in English pronouns: Myth and reality|author=Susanne Wagner|format=PDF|url=http://www.freidok.uni-freiburg.de/volltexte/1412/pdf/Diss_Freidok.pdf|date=2004-07-22|publisher=Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg]

ee also

* Generic antecedents
* Gender-specific pronoun
* English personal pronouns

References

External links

*William Malone Baskervill and James Witt Sewel, [http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/wmbaskervill/bl-wmbaskervill-grammar-syntax-pronouns.htm "An English Grammar"] , 1896."'
* [http://www.bartleby.com/61/75/H0097500.html 'He'] , "The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language", Fourth edition, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000).