§ 12. PRONOUNS. In a brilliant study (_Progress in Language_, London 1894) Jespersen exemplifies the economy and resources of English from the detailed history of the Pronoun. In the first and second persons fourteenth-century usage does not differ greatly from that of the Authorized Version of the Bible. But the pronoun of the third person shows a variety of developments. In the singular an objective case replaces, without practical disadvantages, the older accusative and dative: _him_ (OE. _hine_ and _him_), _her(e)_ (OE. _hīe_ and _hiere_), _(h)it_ (OE. _hit_ and _him_). The possessive _his_ still serves for the neuter as well as the masculine, e.g. _þat ryuer... chaungeþ ~hys~ fordes_ XIII _a_ 55 f.; though an uninflected neuter possessive _hit_ occasionally appears in the fourteenth century. In the plural, where one would expect objective _him_ from the regular OE. dat. pl. _him_, clearness is gained by the choice of unambiguous _hem_, from an OE. dat. pl. by-form _heom_. But as we see from _Orfeo_, ll. 408, 446, 185, in some dialects the nom. sg. masc. (OE. _hē_), nom. sg. fem. (OE. _hēo_), and nom. pl. (OE. _hīe_), had all become ME. _he_. The disadvantages of such ambiguity increased as the flexional system of nouns and adjectives collapsed, and a remedy was found in the adoption of new forms. For the nom. sg. fem., _s(c)he_, _s(c)ho_ (mostly Northern), come into use, which are probably derived from _si̯ē_, _se̯ō_, the corresponding case of the definite article. The innovation was long resisted in the South, and _ho_, an unambiguous development of _heō_, remains late in W. Midland texts like _Pearl_. In the nom. pl. ambiguous _he_ was replaced by _þei_, the nom. pl. of the Norse definite article. This is the regular form in all except the Southern specimens II (orig.), III, XIII. And although the full series of Norse forms _þei_, _þeir_, _þe(i)m_ is found in Orm at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Chaucer and other Midland writers of the fourteenth century as a rule have only _þei_, with native English _her(e)_, _hem_ in the oblique cases. (For details see the language note to each specimen.) The poss. pl. _her(e)_, beside _hor(e)_, was still liable to confusion with the obj. sg. fem. _her(e)_, cp. II 92. Consequently this was the next point to be gained by the Norse forms, e.g. in VII 181. In the Northern texts X, XVI, XVII, all from late MSS., the Norse forms _þai_, _þa(i)r_, _þa(i)me_ are fully established; but _(h)em_, which was throughout unambiguous, survived into modern dialects in the South and Midlands. Note the reduced nominative form _a_ 'he', 'they' in XIII; and the objective _his(e)_ 'her', 'them' in III, which has not been satisfactorily explained.