Pronouns in Latin

Personal Pronouns (Personalia)

Latin personal pronouns have a specific system. The language only has pronouns for the first and second persons:

• First person: ego (I) and the plural form nos (we).
• Second person: tu (thou/you) and the plural vos (you).

It is noteworthy that special personal pronouns for the third person did not historically develop. To say "he", "she", or "it", demonstrative pronouns are used. Most commonly, the forms is (he / that), ea (she / that), and id (it / that) serve this role.

Grammatical nuance: when a personal pronoun is supposed to act as the subject with a verb predicate, it is customary to omit it. The ending of the Latin verb itself exhaustively indicates the person and number. For example, in the classical phrase homo sum, the word sum already means "I am", so when translating into Russian or English, we have to add the subject — "[I am] a human".

Reflexive Pronoun (Reflexivum)

The reflexive pronoun sui translates as "himself/herself/itself/themselves". It has two strict grammatical limitations:

1. Just like in Russian and English, this pronoun has no Nominative form (Nominativus), since the action is always directed at the subject, and the word cannot be a subject.
2. Unlike some languages where we can say "I see myself" or "you see yourself", the Latin reflexive pronoun sui is used exclusively in relation to the third person (he/she/it does something for oneself).

Possessive Pronouns (Possessiva)

Possessive pronouns indicate possession and behave in a sentence like adjectives. They completely match the declension type of first- and second-declension adjectives.

Main forms:

• meus, a, um — my;
• tuus, a, um — thy/your (singular);
• noster, tra, trum — our;
• vester, tra, trum — your (plural).

These pronouns agree with nouns in gender, number, and case, exactly like regular modifiers.

Relative Pronouns (Relativum)

The key relative pronoun is qui, quae, quod. It translates as "which", "who", or by the construction "what" / "that which".

It performs the crucial syntactic function of linking clauses in a complex sentence and is regularly found in classical Latin sayings and aphorisms:

• Qui scribit, bis legit — He who writes, reads twice.
• Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi — What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to an ox.

Professional Medical Expressions

In medical and scientific terminology, fixed prepositional constructions involving pronouns in oblique cases are frequently used:

• pro me — translates as "for me". Here, the first-person personal pronoun is in the Ablative case (Ablativus) after the preposition pro.
• per se — means "in its pure form" or "per se" (literally — "through itself" or "by itself"). In this expression, the reflexive pronoun is in the Accusative case (Accusativus) after the preposition per.

Briefly: answers to topical questions

Class and exam questions

What else to study on this topic

• Full paradigm of personal pronouns ego and tu declension
• Declension of the demonstrative pronoun is, ea, id by cases
• Declension of the relative pronoun qui, quae, quod
• Syntactic role of pronouns in complex sentences

Other topics in the section "Termino-element Vocabulary (from meaning to TE)"

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