Personal Pronouns

Before you start exploring verb conjugation tables, it is necessary to recognise the Old English personal pronouns which accompany the verbs. Personal pronouns take different forms depending on number, case, and grammatical gender. For now let's just look at the nominative forms of the pronouns in the table below.

You may notice in the sentence below that 'you' in the first sentence is spelled 'þe'. This is the accusative form of the pronoun 'þu', and these forms will be explored in a later module. For now, it is enough to know that pronouns decline like regular nouns. It is important to note that a verb always agrees with its subject. This means the form of the verb changes depending on its subject. So while in modern English, 'I love you' and 'you love me' use the same form of the verb, in Old English it changes. You can see this change in the two sentences below.

As you can see, Old English personal pronouns are not that different to modern English ones. You can practice using personal pronouns below. When you're ready, let's take a look at Weak Verbs I and see how Old English verbs work in more detail.

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