Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 54, pronoun, pros and cons.

This time we're going to talk about me and you and them.

In other words, we're going to talk about pronouns.

Our modern personal pronouns are part of our core vocabulary.

Some of them have barely changed over the past 1500 years.

But some of them have changed a lot.

And interestingly, some of them were borrowed from the Vikings.

A few old forms even linger with us today, where it's like thou and thee and thy.

So this time we're going to explore the history of our modern personal pronouns.

And we'll also examine why the proper use of those pronouns is sometimes a challenge

for modern English speakers.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com.

And my email address is kevinathistoryofenglishpodcast.com.

And I continue to work on the transcripts for the old episodes.

I haven't posted them yet, but I hope to have them up shortly.

So let's turn to this episode about pronouns.

Now this is the first time that I've dedicated an entire episode to one particular part of speech.

I originally intended to discuss pronouns in the overall context of Norse influences

on modern English, since several of our modern pronouns came from the Vikings.

But pronouns are so common in our modern speech, and there's so much history to discuss

that I thought they deserved their own episode.

...