3rd Person Personal and Reflexive Pronouns

Table of contents

1. Pronouns
2. 3rd Person Personal Pronouns
3. 3rd Person Reflexive Pronouns

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Pronouns

A pronoun (from Latin prō, “in place of”, + nōmen, “name” and the Latin word for a noun) is a word that takes the place of a noun to vary up a narrative and reduce monotony. For example, imagine the following narrative:

• The boy saw the trees. The boy walked to the trees, and the boy sat under the trees.

The repetitions of “the boy” and “the trees” make for a boring narrative. But we can substitute in various pronouns for the second and third appearances of each noun, with certain aspects of each pronoun making it clear that they refer back to the boy and the trees. For example:

• The boy saw the trees. He walked to them, and he sat under them.

“He” and “them” are pronouns that take the place of “boy” and “trees” respectively, and certain aspects of each pronoun make it clear to which noun they refer. For example, “he” indicates a masculine singular entity, while “them” refers to a plural entity. One boy and multiple trees make it clear to which nouns “he” and “them” refer.

Latin pronouns, like nouns and adjectives, have a gender, case, and number, the options for each of which are the same as those for nouns and adjectives (e.g., masculine, feminine, or neuter for gender). The gender and the number of a pronoun is determined by the noun to which the pronoun refers, which is called the pronoun’s antecedent (from Latin ante, “before”, and cedere, “to go”; thus, an antecedent is the noun that goes before the pronoun). The pronoun used in place of the noun must have the same gender and number as the antecedent. This works the same in Latin as in English. Think, for example, about the following pronoun subtitutions:

• The boy throws the ball. He throws the ball.
• We listened to the teacher. We listened to her.
• The students took the exam. They took the exam.

“He”, “her”, and “they” exhibit the same gender and number of their antecedents (“the boy”, “the teacher”, and “the students” respectively).

The same rules apply in Latin. For example, you would use ea (feminine nominative singular of is, ea, id – see below) to substitute for mater (feminine nominative singular) and is (masculine nominative singular of is, ea, id – see below) to substitute for pater (masculine nominative singular).

This also applies for nouns that are not typically biologically gendered. For the Latin word for table (mensa, mensae, f. - “table”), you would use ea as the pronoun because the noun is feminine (although we might think it’s neuter because it’s a table). Remember that a noun’s gender is a static fact that you have to memorize with the dictionary entry.

Note, however, that although a pronoun must agree with its antecedent in gender and in number, it doesn’t necessarily need to match in case because a pronoun can fulfill a different function/use within its sentence than the original antecedent fulfilled within its sentence. Take a look at the following English example:

• The boy sat under the trees. I saw him.

The pronoun “him” refers back to “the boy” as its antecedent. However, although “the boy” is the subject of the first sentence, “him” is the direct object of the second sentence. While the pronoun agrees with the noun in gender and in number (masculine singular), its case would necessarily be different; while “the boy” would be a nominative subject, “him” would have to be an accusative direct object.

There are different kinds of pronouns that fulfill different functions and are translated in different ways. In this unit, we will consider two types of pronouns and specific examples of them: personal pronouns and reflexive pronouns.

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3rd Person Personal Pronouns

A personal pronoun is a pronoun that indicates an entity related to the person of a verb. For example, examples of the 1st person personal pronoun include English pronouns like “I” or “me” in the singular and “we” or “us” in the plural, while examples of the 2nd person personal pronoun include English pronouns like “you” or “y’all.”

Here, we will consider the 3rd person personal pronoun: is, ea, id, which translates in its various forms, depending on its gender, number, and case, to English pronouns like “he”/”him”, “she/her”, “it”, and “they/them”.

Because pronouns, like adjectives, need to be able to cover a variety of gender-number-case combinations that could be present in nouns, paradigm charts for pronouns can be as large as those for adjectives. Often, however, the declension of pronouns can seem irregular and less straightforward than the find-the-stem-and-attach-an-ending pattern that we’ve been working with so far. Take a look, for example, at the paradigm chart for is, ea, id:

While most forms seem to be built with the stem e- and 1st/2nd declension endings, note exceptions like is and id. In addition, note how the genitive singular and dative singular across all three genders decline like an -īus adjective (eius and eī).

Recall that the pronoun has to match its antecedent in gender and number, though not necessarily case. Thus, when you’re trying to find the antecedent of a pronoun, you have to be aware of all the gender and number possibilities for the nouns that come before the pronoun. For example:

• puellae taurum duxērunt. mater eās vīdit.

In this sentence, the pronoun eās refers back to some antecedent that we have to identify to get the right picture of what’s happening in our heads. eās has to be feminine accusative plural, and in terms of nouns that come in the sentence before the one that contains eās, our options are puellae or taurum. Based on the nouns’ genders and numbers, we can rule out taurum (masculine singular) as an antecedent for eās (feminine plural) and understand that it is the girls that the mother saw:

• The girls led the bull. The mother saw them [meaning ‘the girls’].

Because a conjugated verb indicates the subject of the verb via its ending, we often do not see the nominative forms of the personal pronoun used except to emphasize a subject or help us disambiguate/differentiate between different subjects. For example:

• bonum fēcit. “She did a good thing.”
• ea bonum fēcit, sed is malum fēcit. “She did a good thing, but he did a bad thing.”

For the genitive forms of the pronoun, note that you can also translate them as possessive adjectives to make your sentence more idiomatically sound. Here are some examples:

• equī eōrum cucurrērunt. Literally, “The horses of them ran”, but better “Their horses ran.”
• puella nōmen eius audīvit. Literally, “The girl heard the name of him” [if eius is masculine nominative singular], but better “The girl heard his name.”

Note that in the second example, eius can be feminine singular, but it cannot refer back to the subject puella, to yield a translation like “The girl heard her own name.” This is because there is a special type of pronoun/adjective that refers back to the subject: the reflxive.

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3rd Person Reflexive Pronouns

Another type of pronoun that is related to the person of a verb is the reflexive pronoun, which is a pronoun in a non-nominative case that refers back to the subject of the sentence (“reflexive” from the Latin verb reflectere “to bend back”). In English, reflexives are usually translated as with the suffix -self or -selves:

• I love myself.
• You teach yourself Latin.
• I gave a present to myself.
• They helped themselves.

While the first three examples indicate examples of 1st or 2nd person reflexives (“myself”, “yourself”), the last shows an example of the 3rd person reflexive pronoun (“themselves”, plural; singular examples include “himself”, “herself”, “itself”, or “themselves” [when singular]). Like the personal pronoun, the reflexive pronoun also has a gender, case, and number, but its possible forms are limited in number and cover a wide variety of combinations:

The reflexive does not have a nominative form by necessity because all forms of the reflexive refer back to the subject. In the oblique (i.e., non-nominative) cases, however, there is only one form per case to cover all gender and number possibilities. This means that when you see a form of the 3rd person reflexive in your sentence, you will need to use the subject to translate the reflexive correctly. Note the following examples which all use the form sē as an accusative direct object:

• puer sē vīdit. “The boy saw himself.”
• puerī sē vīdērunt. “The boys saw themselves.”
• puella sē vīdit. “The girl saw herself.”
• puellae sē vīdērunt. “The girls saw themselves.”
• equus sē vīdit. “The horse saw itself.” (or, if you ascribe gender to the horse) “The horse saw himself.”

As you can see, the proper translation of the reflexive depends wholly on the subject. Even the same form sē has a variety of different possible translations because of the fact that it’s capacious enough to refer back to subjects of all different genders and numbers.

Note the differences between using a 3rd person personal pronoun and a 3rd person reflexive pronoun:

• amāvit eam. (“She loves her.”)
• amāvit sē. (“She loves herself.”)
• Donum eī dat. (“He gives a gift to him” (i.e., a person other than himself))
• Donum sibi dat. (“He gives a gift to himself.”)

Note the differences here. When you use is, ea, id, you are referring to someone other than the subject. So, in “amāvit eam”, the subject “she” is not the same person as the direct object “her.” By using the reflexive in the second sentence, though, you make it clear that the direct object “herself” is the same person as the subject “she.”

It is worth noting that the genitive of the reflexive pronoun is generally not used to indicate possession (there are other uses of the genitive that we will encounter later). In order to do that, we need to use a 3rd person reflexive adjective: suus, sua, suum - “[his/her/its/their] own”. Note the following examples:

• puer librum suum habuit. “The boy had his own book.”
• puella librum suum habuit. “The girl had her own book.”

Note that the adjective suus, sua, suum matches its noun, librum, in gender, case, and number (masculine accusative singular) in both examples. However, the translation in each example is different because the subject to which the reflexive adjective refers is different: boy versus girl.

To emphasize the difference between the personal pronoun and the reflexive pronoun/adjective, let’s revisit the last example in the personal pronouns section above, but this time interpreting eius as feminine genitive singular:

• puella nōmen eius audīvit. “The girl heard her name.”
• puella nōmen suum audīvit. “The girl heard her own name.”

In these examples, the use of eius means that the name belongs to someone other than the puella. The use of suum, on the other hand, means that the subject, puella, is the one who posseses that name.

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