Origin and Spread of the Personal Pronoun They: La Estorie del Evangelie, a Case Study: Medieval English in a Multilingual Context: Current Methodologies and Approaches

Abstract

The modern-day 3pl. personal pronouns they, their and them derive from the þ-type 3pl. pronouns þei(-), þai(-) and þe(-); they appeared in Middle English and replaced the Old English h-type pronouns hīe, hira and him. The þ-type forms have traditionally been identified as Norse-derived (cf. the Old Icelandic pronouns þeir, þeira and þeim). Accordingly, they are often presented as one of the key examples of the significant influence that Old Norse had on the non-technical vocabulary of medieval English, a process that was facilitated by the intensity of the linguistic contact and the typological proximity of the two languages. However, close examination of the early English orthographic and distributional textual evidence indicates that there is scope for a re-evaluation of the Norse influence on the development of English 3pl. pronouns (e.g. Ogura 2001; Cole 2018, Forthcoming.). The present paper focuses on the 3pl. pronominal usage recorded in the seven manuscripts of the Middle English poem known as La estorie del evangelie. We explore how scribes from different dialectal areas responded to the (near-)categorical þ-type system of the early exemplars of Estorie. And equally, how scribes from the same dialectal area adapted (and possibly adopted) the different pronominal systems of their exemplars at a local level, and what light these processes shed on origin. We pay special attention to the mixed h-type and þ-type paradigms of the West and South-West Midlands. The findings support our hypothesis that þ-type pronouns are the result of polygenesis, as opposed to the traditional etymological explanation based solely on language contact at the expense of native derivation. With its nuanced and multifaceted approach to the data, this work offers an essential point of reference for the study of the etymology of 3pl. personal pronouns and, more broadly, the impact of Anglo-Scandinavian contact on the English lexicon.