Proto-Indo-European pronouns | Japanese pronouns | German pronouns | English personal pronouns |
Around 1873, Romani personal pronouns became inconsistently marked, according to Leland, who also notes that case distinction began fading overall, and gender marking also disappeared.
Sometimes the distinction is neutralized in the plural, as in most modern Germanic languages (examples of gender-neutral third-person plural pronouns include English they and German sie), and also in modern Russian (where the equivalent pronoun is они oni).
The German personal pronouns must always have the same gender, same number, and same case as their antecedents.
Malcolm Ross in his 2005 classification of TNG used them to help reconstruct the pronouns of the Mabuso family, saying that "the integrity of the Mabuso group is fairly obvious", suggesting that Mabuso is a recent development, but Ethnologue 16 placed the Hanseman languages directly under Croisilles.
Some linguists suggest that the Japanese language does not have pronouns as such, since, unlike pronouns in most other languages that have them, these words are syntactically and morphologically identical to nouns.
Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners were fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), two grammatical numbers (singular and plural) and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter).
The personal pronouns had their own unique forms and endings, and some had two distinct stems; this is most obvious in the first person singular, where the two stems are still preserved, as for instance in English I and me.
Mary Talbot (1995/2003) used the concept in her work on a synthetic sisterhood in teenage girls' magazines, analysing the linguistic devices (pronouns, presuppositions) constructing a simulated friendship between reader and producer.
A version of the song using the word "girl" and female pronouns is heard in the movie Different for Girls.