Latin/Personal Pronouns Lesson 3

Salvēte omnēs!

Welcome to all Latin learners! If you’re just joining us and want to catch up, the links you’ll need are on the right.

As always, if you want to skip grammar and jump to sample sentences, just skip down to the bottom section of this post. If you want to memorize vocabulary, the Memrise course might be your best option.

New Grammar
Today we’ll continue learning the personal pronouns of Latin, with the singular side of the 3rd person pronouns. Since the 3rd person refers to the person or persons spoken about in a sentence, and since there are 3 genders and 5 cases in Latin, if you include both singular and plural there are 30 forms that need to be mastered for personal pronouns. There is some overlap, but still that’s a lot for one lesson. According to some grammar authorities, there is no official 3rd person pronoun in Latin, and what is used instead is actually one of the demonstrative pronouns, meaning “that” or “those”. In fact, this form is sometimes used in that way, as a demonstrative adjective or pronoun. So for example,
 * Eam puellam videō. = I see that girl.”

probably over time became
 * Eam videō. = I see that (female person)/her.”

In our introductory lessons we’ll keep these types of sentences to a minimum, but it’s only fair you should know that there is a broader use, and that many pronouns do double duty as adjectives. Here are the singular forms for 3rd person pronouns:

We use the letter j in the genitive but many purists do not; it represents that the i is used as a consonant here. Either is perfectly acceptable and I will try to reflect that in the Memrise course. Also note that this is not to be confused with the reflexive possessive adjective, taught below.

Reflexives: when a 3rd person pronoun is used reflexively (one of the objective cases refers to the subject of the sentence), we must use a special set of reflexive pronouns. Only one form in each case works for all genders and both singular and plural:

Reflexive possessive adjective: used instead of “ejus” to refer to something belonging to the subject of the sentence: This may seem like a lot of pronoun forms, and it is... but it allows finer distinctions in meaning than English, with fewer ambiguities. I’ll try to give some sentences that illustrate this.

Practice
Pronouns are little words, but they can be hard to master. I’ve seen a lot of students struggle with them, and I think they need to be learned early and reviewed fairly often. This is an area where interactive formats can be amazing as a practice tool. You can practice the sentences on Memrise of course. The next lesson will focus on the plural forms of the 3rd person pronouns. Bonam fortūnam!