Lesson 3.4 · Words that go with nouns
Personal pronouns
I, you, we — including the plural “ye” that English lost.
Four little words, each a stem plus the same job endings you already know:
| doing it | done to | of | to / for | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I / me | mis | min | mu | mi |
| you (one person) | sis | sin | su | si |
| we / us | nis | nin | nu | ni |
| ye / you (more than one) | vis | vin | vu | vi |
English lost the difference between one "you" and several, so this course uses the old words you and ye to keep them apart. It matters more often than you would think — many of the Bible's promises and commands are addressed to a group, and here you can see it.
nis agapanō, hoti autos prōtos agapata nin.
We love, because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)
nis is "we" doing the loving; nin is "us"
being loved. Same word, one letter apart, exactly like
theos and theon.
Personal pronouns
3rd person is the gendered stem aut-, declined like a noun (autos, autas, auton…). Possession is just the genitive. The stem's fixed -i elides before a vowel-initial case marker: mi+u → mu (≈ Greek μου).
| nom | acc | gen | dat | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | mis | min | mu | mi |
| you | sis | sin | su | si |
| we | nis | nin | nu | ni |
| ye | vis | vin | vu | vi |
m, s, n,
v. They come back in Part 4 as the letters
that say who is doing a verb. One set of sounds, learned once, used
twice.In the Greek — four suppletive stems
Greek's personal pronouns are among its most irregular words:
ἐγώ / ἐμοῦ / μοι / με for "I", and σύ / σοῦ / σοί / σέ, ἡμεῖς,
ὑμεῖς. Biblang gives each one a fixed stem
(mi-, si-, ni-,
vi-) and then runs it through the ordinary endings.
The stems themselves are simply chosen — this is one of the few
corners of the language where a form has to be learned rather than
worked out.
The -i drops before the "of" ending, giving
mu and su — which land exactly on Greek's
μου and σου.