Неопределенно-личные местоимения

Man, men, me – разная степень фон.ослабленности man. В англ потом – one, в немецком осталось man.

Both in ME and in Early NE the pronouns were subjected to extensive grammatical changes. The category of Number wasbrought into conformity with the corresponding categories of nouns and verbs; the forms of the dual number of the 1st and 2nd p. went into disuse in Early ME.

The category of Case underwent profound alterations. The forms of the Dat. and the Acc. cases began to merge in OE. The results of the simplification were less drastic than in the noun morphology: two cases fell togeth­er - Dat. and Ace. -into what may be called the Obj. case but its dis­tinction from the Nom. case was preserved. In Late ME the paradigm of personal pronouns consisted of two cases: Nom. and Obj. Cf. the following instances of the OE Dat. and Ace. cases of pronouns used as objects after the verbs sellan `give' and nemnian `call' and sim­ilar ME phrases with the verbs given and callere governing pronouns in the Obj. case. In Early NE the syncretism of cases entered a new phase: the Nom. case began to merge with the Obj. case. In, the following quo­tation from Shakespeare you, the Obj. case of ye, is used as the subject, while she, the Nom. case, is an object. Yet the tendency to reduce the case system of personal pronouns was not fully realised. Only two personal pronouns, you and it lost all case distinctions in NE.

The modern pronoun you comes from the ME Obj. case you; its Nom. case ye has become obsolete. The pronoun it goes back to the ME Nom. case it, OE hit; the ME Obj. case of it, him was identical with the form of the Masc. pronoun he, him, it was used in the function of object in ME as a variant of him, as a substitute of inanimate nouns; eventually it displaced him. This replacement reflects the new grouping of nouns into animate and inanimate, which had superseded the division into genders. The loss of case distinctions by these two pronouns did not break up the paradigm of personal pronouns, since the other pronouns have pre­served the distinction of two cases, Nom. and Obj. (I - me, she - her, etc.): therefore the non-distinctive forms you and it are merely in­<tances of homonymy in the two-case system. The OE Gen. case of personal pronouns split from the other forms and turned into a new class of pronouns - possessive. In OE the Gen. case of personal pronouns - like the Gen. case of nouns - was commonly used in the attributive function; its use as an object was rare. Some of these forms were treated like other noun mod­ifiers: they agreed with the head-noun in case and number, while others did not. In ME these pronouns became more homogeneous: they had all lost their forms of agreement and were uninflected. They can be regarded as a separate class of pronouns termed "possessive". In Early NE there arose a new possessive pronoun its derived from; it; its was built on the analogy of the Gen. case of nouns, of the form, his or the new variants of other possessive pronouns: oures, yours. Demonstrative Pronouns. Development of Articles. Demonstrative pronouns were adjective-pronouns. In Early ME the OE demonstrative pronouns s e, seo, þæt and þ es, þeos, þis - lost most of their inflected forms: out of seventeen forms each retained only two. The ME descendants of these pronouns are that and this, the former Nom. and Acc. cases, Neut. sg, which served now as the sg of all cases and genders. Each pronoun had a respective pl form, which made up a balanced paradigm of forms opposed through number: Sg this, that Pl these, those. The other direction of the development of the demonstrative pronouns s e, seo, þæt led to the formation of the definite article. This development is associated with a change in form and meaning. In the course of ME there arose an important formal difference be­tween the demonstrative pronoun and the definite article: as a demon­strative pronoun that preserved number distinctions whereas as a definite article -- usually in the weakened form the it was unin­flected. In the 14c. the article had lost all traces of inflection and became a short unaccented form-word.

In OE there existed two words, an, a numeral, and sum, an:definite pronoun, which were often used in functions approaching those of the modern indefinite article. In early ME the indefinite pronoun an which had a five-case declension in OE lost its inflection. It is believed that the growth of articles in Early ME was caused by several internal linguistic factors. The develop­ment of the definite article is usually connected with the chan g es in the declension of adjectives, namely with the loss of distinctions between the strong and weak forms. Originally the weak forms of adjectives had a certain demonstrative meaning resembling that of the modern defi­nite article. These forms were commonly used together with the demon­strative pronouns se, seo, þæt. In contrast to weak forms, the strong forms of adjectives conveyed the meaning of "indefiniteness" which was later transferred to an, a numeral and indefinite pronoun. In case the nouns were used without adjectives or the weak and strong forms coincided, the form-words an and pl,-et turned out to be the only means of expressing these meanings. Another factor which may account for the more regular use of arti­cles was the changing function of the word order. Relative freedom in the position of words in the OE sentence made it possible to use word order for communicative purposes, e. g. to present a new thing or to re­fer to a familiar thing already known to the listener.