3. Pronouns

The pronoun system is the most visible difference between EModE and modern English, and in the biblical register it is also the most frequent one: in JPS 1917 the forms thou, thee, thy, thine, thyself and ye make up 4 895 of 156 603 words — one word in 32 (2026-10-17). A parser that gets them wrong loses person, number and case in every third sentence.

3.1 The paradigm

Bold marks what differs from modern English. Sources: Abbott 1884 §§ 212–213 (thee for thou), 217–218 (his), 228 (its), 231–235 (thou and you), 236 (ye), 237 (mine/thine); Hejná & Walkden 2022, §4.3.1.

Person and number in UD terms

The proposed lemmas follow the convention the db already uses for the modern forms: me → I, him → he, thee → thou, while possessive determiners keep their own lemma (my → my, his → his, thy → thy). The registry (en/data/ud-registry-en.tsv) allows Style=Arch on PRON, so all of these features pass the gate.

3.2 Thou and you: grammar

In Old and Middle English thou was simply the singular and ye/you the plural. Under French influence the plural became a polite singular (the T/V distinction: Brown & Gilman 1960, cited in Hejná & Walkden 2022, §4.3.1). By Shakespeare's time:

«Thou, in Shakespeare's time was, very much like "du" now among the Germans, the pronoun of (1) affection towards friends (2) good-humoured superiority to servants, and (3) contempt or anger to strangers. It had, however, already fallen somewhat into disuse, and, being regarded as archaic, was naturally adopted (4) in the higher poetic style and in the language of solemn prayer.» — Abbott 1884, §231.

Abbott's further observations (§§231–235):

• fathers almost always address sons with thou, sons fathers with you;
• a master uses thou to a servant, but not always (§232);
• thou to a stranger who is not an inferior is an insult (§233); Sir Toby's advice in Twelfth Night III.2, «if thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss», uses thou as a verb meaning «to insult by saying thou» (Hejná & Walkden 2022, §4.3.1);
• speakers switch inside one scene with their mood: Valentine and Proteus use thou in earnest and you when jesting (Two Gentlemen of Verona I.1; Abbott §231).

Wales (1983, cited by Hejná & Walkden) argues that by the late 16th century thou was already rare and that a switch to it was usually expressive. The Quakers then made a point of thee and thou to everyone; George Fox called you to one person an «evill custome» (Hejná & Walkden 2022, box «Pronoun iconoclasts»).

In the biblical register

The Bible keeps the old number distinction, not the social one: thou is singular, ye/you plural, whoever the addressee. God says thou to Adam and Adam says thou to God:

• «Where art thou?» (jps:GEN:69, GEN 3.9) — God to the man.
• «wilt Thou indeed sweep away and not forgive the place» (jps:GEN:466, GEN 18.24) — Abraham to God, with the capital that JPS gives divine pronouns.
• «Ye shall not eat of any tree of the garden?» (jps:GEN:61, GEN 3.1) — the serpent to the woman, quoting God's command to the couple (plural).

Deuteronomy addresses Israel as one people in thou and as a crowd in ye, often in the same chapter. The counts by book (2026-10-17) show how much the person system weighs in the law books:

In Deuteronomy one word in 16 is a second-person singular pronoun.

In the tales, thou is a voice marker. A frog, a king, a fairy, a peasant in a translated folk tale say thou: «But what wilt thou give me if I succeed in fetching thy plaything up again?» (book:pg11027:1293, Grimm's Fairy Stories); «"Art thou sitting?" "I sit." "Dost thou spin?" "I spin."» (book:pg22373:5543, Russian Fairy Tales). A narrator who switches to thou in the middle of modern English usually marks prayer, poetry, an oath or an old saying.

3.3 Ye and you: case

Ye is the nominative plural, you the oblique. Abbott §236 says the distinction is «observed in our version of the Bible» but «disregarded by Elizabethan authors», who use ye in questions, entreaties and rhetorical appeals and you as subject freely («Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong», Julius Caesar I.3, quoted by Abbott). JPS 1917 keeps the case distinction strictly (2026-10-17):

So in JPS ye is nearly always a subject and you nearly always an object or oblique. The db agrees: ye is nsubj 839 times, nsubj:pass 26, obj 4; you is obl 236, obj 153, iobj 61, nmod 50.

Vocative ye. «hear, ye sons of Jacob» (jps:GEN:1600, GEN 49.2) and «ye take too much upon you, ye sons of Levi» (jps:NUM:616, NUM 16.7) put ye before a noun, like modern «you guys». The db has ye with relation det on the noun in four sentences (jps:GEN:1600, jps:DEU:885, jps:NUM:616, jps:DEU:928). UD English EWT 2.18 does it the other way round: in «you guys» the pronoun is the head and guys is its nmod:unmarked (three sentences in en_ewt-ud-train.conllu). Following EWT, «ye sons of Jacob» is ye (vocative) ← sons (nmod:unmarked); the det analysis should go.

3.4 Thee for thou, and other case slips

Abbott §§212–213: thee sometimes stands where thou is expected, after imperatives («Look thee», «Haste thee») and after be («I would not be thee»). In the biblical register the imperative-plus-thee construction is a reflexive or ethical dative:

• «get thee into the land of Moriah» (jps:GEN:577, GEN 22.2) — get thee = go, thee reflexive object.
• «Make thee an ark of gopher wood» (jps:GEN:163, GEN 6.14) — make thee = make for yourself, thee is iobj/obl (benefactive), not the subject.
• «Take Me a heifer of three years old» (jps:GEN:385, GEN 15.9) — the same with Me.

The subject of these imperatives is not expressed; thee must not become nsubj. In the db thee is obl 324 times, obj 361, iobj 111, nmod 75 — never nsubj.

Abbott §241 notes the opposite case too: thou is often omitted after a verb in the 2nd person singular, because the ending already says who («Hast eaten?»). The ending -est/-st is then the only subject marker (chapter 4).

3.5 Mine and thine before vowels

Mine and thine are the old forms of the determiner before a vowel or h, like an before a vowel: «mine eyes», «thine heir». Abbott §237 says Shakespeare uses both forms before vowels «with little distinction» and that mine/thine tend to be the unemphatic forms. The 1769 KJV is regular about it; JPS 1917 modernises half of the cases:

JPS examples: «This man shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir» (jps:GEN:380, GEN 15.4). Predicative thine: «nor aught that is thine» (jps:GEN:375, GEN 14.23), «And thy issue … shall be thine» (jps:GEN:1581, GEN 48.6).

In the db, thine has lemma thine 109 times, thy 3, Thine 3, while mine has lemma mine 27, my 19 and Mine 1. Neither is consistent. UD English EWT 2.18 lemmatizes mine as my 18 times out of 20 (en_ewt-ud-train.conllu). Proposal (chapter 13): mine → my and thine → thy in both uses, as EWT does; lemma in lower case always.

3.6 His, it and its

Until about 1600 the genitive of it was his: «the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind» (KJV Gen 1:11). Its appears at the end of the 16th century; Abbott §228 writes that it «was not used originally in the Authorized Version of the Bible, and is said to have been rarely used in Shakespeare's time», though common in Florio's Montaigne (1603). A dialect it genitive also occurs: «The innocent milk in it most innocent mouth» (Winter's Tale III.2, quoted in §228).

For Mova this is a coreference trap in the KJV and in older texts: his can point to a tree, a city, an altar. In JPS 1917 the problem is gone: its 163, KJV 1 (chapter 1). For KJV-style texts the coreference module must allow his → inanimate antecedent when no animate candidate agrees in gender.

3.7 Relatives and indefinites

Abbott §244 also lists the omission of the relative in subject position («There is a fellow somewhat near the door, he should be the man» style), which leaves a clause with no subject and no relative; it is rare in JPS.

3.8 Decisions Mova must make

1. Lemma of ye. ye → ye (db now, 879 tokens) or ye → you (as thee → thou). Choose one; the db's choice (ye) is defensible because ye is a separate nominative form, as thou is.
2. thee → thou. The db has 713 thou and 243 thee lemmas for the same form; 202 sentences carry a thee lemma (2026-10-17). One rule fixes them all.
3. Person on the archaic pronouns. The db has Person=3|Gender=Neut on thou 115 times and Person=3 on thy 20 times and thine 6 times — 98 sentences. These features come from the graph parser's lexicon fill (chapter 12): when the parser changes the tag of a word, it copies the most frequent FEATS of that tag (PRP → the features of it). prag/src/feats.rs reads Person from FEATS to decide the person of the subject, so these 98 sentences enter the pragmatic layer as third-person sentences.
4. Style=Arch. 1 071 thou tokens have it, 309 do not; thee 164 of 956; ye 878 of 879. The feature should be on every archaic form or on none. Chapter 13 proposes «on every one», set by the lexicon, not by the teacher.

3.9 What the small model does now

en-agreed.bin (2026-10-15), run on the 6 105 Torah sentences (SLM now, 2026-10-17), UPOS of the archaic pronouns:

thee is a noun to the model 60 % of the time and thine 83 %. The reason is plain: UD English training data has almost none of these words. In the 12 544 training sentences of EWT 2.18 there is one thou, three thy, two ye and no thee, thine, hath, doth or shalt; art is the noun 14 times and the verb once. An unknown lower-case word after a verb looks like an object noun. Of the 6 013 Torah sentences aligned with the db, 821 have a UPOS error on one of these pronouns. These are not hard cases for a lexicon: thou, thee, thy, thine, thyself, ye are never anything but pronouns in this register (the article ye of printed «ye olde» does not occur). Chapter 13 proposes a closed-class override before the tagger.

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