/The Pronoun/--The following paradigm shows the inflections of the personal pronoun in the American common speech:
/Singular/ /Plural/ /Nominative/ I we /Possessive Conjoint/ my our /Possessive Absolute/ mine ourn /Objective/ me us
/Singular/ /Nominative/ you yous /Possessive Conjoint/ your your /Possessive Absolute/ yourn yourn /Objective/ you yous
/Nominative/ he they /Possessive Conjoint/ his their /Possessive Absolute/ hisn theirn /Objective/ him them
/Nominative/ she they /Possessive Conjoint/ her their /Possessive Absolute/ hern theirn /Objective/ her them
/Nominative/ it they /Possessive Conjoint/ its theirn /Possessive Absolute/ its their /Objective/ it them
These inflections, as we shall see, are often disregarded in use, but nevertheless it is profitable to glance at them as they [Pg213] stand. The only variations that they show from standard English are the substitution of /n/ for /s/ as the distinguishing mark of the absolute form of the possessive, and the attempt to differentiate between the logical and the merely polite plurals in the second person by adding the usual sign of the plural to the former. The use of /n/ in place of /s/ is not an American innovation. It is found in many of the dialects of English, and is, in fact, historically quite as sound as the use of /s/. In John Wiclif's translation of the Bible (/circa/ 1380) the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount (Mark v, 3) is made: "Blessed be the pore in spirit, for the kyngdam in hevenes is /heren/." And in his version of Luke xxiv, 24, is this: "And some of /ouren/ wentin to the grave." Here /heren/, (or /herun/) represents, of course, not the modern /hers/, but /theirs/. In Anglo-Saxon the word was /heora/, and down to Chaucer's day a modified form of it, /here/, was still used in the possessive plural in place of the modern /their/, though /they/ had already displaced /hie/ in the nominative.[54] But in John Purvey's revision of the Wiclif Bible, made a few years later, /hern/ actually occurs in II Kings viii, 6, thus: "Restore thou to hir alle things that ben /hern/." In Anglo-Saxon there had been no distinction between the conjoint and absolute forms of the possessive pronouns; the simple genitive sufficed for both uses. But with the decay of that language the surviving remnants of its grammar began to be put to service somewhat recklessly, and so there arose a genitive inflection of this genitive--a true double inflection. In the Northern dialects of English that inflection was made by simply adding /s/, the sign of the possessive. In the Southern dialects the old /n/-declension was applied, and so there arose such forms as /minum/ and /eowrum/ (=/mine/ and /yours/), from /min/ and /eower/ (=/my/ and /your/).[55] Meanwhile, the original simple genitive, now become /youre/, also survived, and so the literature of [Pg214] the fourteenth century shows the three forms flourishing side by side: /youre/, /youres/ and /youren/. All of them are in Chaucer.