He

Look up he in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

He (pronounced /ˈhiː/, unstressed /iː/) 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

"He" and "she" are often used to refer to domesticated animals and sometimes non-domesticated animals of the respective gender.

Generic

Some people (who?) believe that "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.^[1]

Other

The pronoun He, with a universally capitalized H is often used to refer to the Christian 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.^[2] In the table RP stands for relative pronoun and PP for personal pronoun.

Notes: RP is relative pronoun and PP personal pronoun. Alternatives are presented in three ways:
slash (/) — used equally; above & below — first preferred; parentheses "()" — unusual usage.

Etymology

Indo-European

The reconstructed Indo-European language provides a demonstrative pronoun ko.^[3]

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.^[4] Pronouns were generally (but not always)^[5] selected to have the same grammatical gender as the noun they referred to. For example, dæg (IPA: [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 (IPA: [heː]). The vowel in hay is normally longer in duration than in the exlamation Hey! (IPA: [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 (IPA: [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. Some people believe "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."^[6] However, many people disagree with this assertion and instead recognize he and him as representative of forced male domination and female subordination.

See also

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

References

External links

• William Malone Baskervill and James Witt Sewel, An English Grammar, 1896.
• 'He', The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth edition, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000).