Everything about He totally explained
He is a
third-person,
singular
personal pronoun (subject case) in Modern English.
Usage
People
He can be used as a substitution of a male's name.
Animals
Grammatically, it's most often incorrect to use the pronouns "he" or "she" when referring to animals, with the neuter "it" being more correct. However, they're both often used colloquially to refer to animals of the appropriate gender.
Generic
Other
The pronoun He, with a universally capitalized H is often used to refer to God.
Gender
The gender system in Modern English is generally
natural,
semantic and
logical, however it's most similar to languages whose gender systems primarily distinguish between the animate and inanimate, and between the personal and impersonal. In the table
RP stands for
relative pronoun and
PP for
personal pronoun.
Etymology
Indo-European
The reconstructed Indo-European language provides a demonstrative pronoun ko.
Germanic
English is a development of the
West Germanic language family.
Old English
Speakers of Old English (OE) considered each noun to have a grammatical gender — masculine, feminine or neuter. Pronouns were generally (but not always) selected to have the same grammatical gender as the noun they referred to. For example, dæg (day) was masculine, so a masculine pronoun was used when referring to a day or days. The personal pronoun for a singular masculine subject was written he, just like Present-Day English (PrDE). However, OE he was probably pronounced like PrDE hay . The vowel in hay is normally longer in duration than in the exlamation Hey! . Because the vowel sound of OE he was long in duration, scholars (and OE dictionaries) now write it as hē.
Middle English
There was one change to the inflection of the masculine pronoun in Middle English. The OE dative form him replaced the OE accusative hine . This meant that, in Middle English, there was no distinction between masculine and impersonal, except in the subject case of the third-person singular, until it from hit replaced him in the object case of the impersonal. So, "there was rather an extended period of time in the history of the English language when the choice of a supposedly masculine personal pronoun (him) said nothing about the gender or sex of the referent."
Further Information
Get more info on 'He'.
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