Latin/Personal Pronouns Lesson 4

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 Vocabulary
This lesson covers the plurals of 3rd person pronouns. As we saw last week, the most commonly used personal pronouns for the 3rd person also serve as demonstratives, and can also be translated as “that” or “those.” Now, there are more commonly used demonstratives which will be introduced later (hic/haec/hoc and ille/illa/illud) and those demonstratives sometimes do double duty as personal pronouns. Confusing, I know! The new forms in this lesson are below; the same reflexive and reflexive possessive forms are used in the plural as in the singular, so they are a repeat of last week’s lesson. And you may find that a graphic representation of the pronouns like the one here is more helpful to you.

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:

In general, the masculine pronoun “ei” and masculine adjectives are used to refer to a mixed group of people including men and women. Gender equity in pronoun use was a non-issue for Romans. The masculine forms are used when in doubt, they are just considered “common” gender. One thing you will never see in Latin is using the neuter to refer to people (like girls or babies in German!). When you see a neuter plural pronoun or adjective used alone, it is referring to things, not people.

Practice
That concludes our introductory series on pronouns. For our next lesson, we have a collection of Latin Christmas carols. Valēte et habēte bonam fortūnam!