History of the first person plural pronoun form in Slavic languages
Ruslana Kotsa, Candidate of Sciences in Philology, Senior Researcher in the Department of History of the Ukrainian Language and Onomastics
Institute of the Ukrainian Language of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
4 Mykhailo Hrushevskyi St., Kyiv 01001, Ukraine
E-mail: rgomonai@ukr.net
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2074-2250
Heading: Articles
Language: Ukrainian
Abstract: The origin of the 1st person plural pronoun (ìè) was not in doubt for a long time. The form *my was unanimously recognized as the nominative case form of the 1st p. pronoun for the Proto-Slavic language. The presence in Bulgarian and Macedonian of the form íèå in the nominative case in a certain way disrupted the systematic nature of the described phenomenon.
In the 2nd half of the 20th century, a number of hypotheses were put forward regarding its origin. The researchers considered íèå as a morphological novelty that arose as a result of the influence of the accusative and indirect cases of the 1st p. pl. pronoun, or as a novelty that arose in various Slavic languages as a result of the tendency to eliminate the suppletivism of the bases of personal pronouns. S.P. Samiilenko considered these theories unconvincing and substantia- ted the presence in the Proto-Slavic language of two forms of the nominative plural of the 1st p. pronoun — *my and *ny. However, the analysis of the arguments given by professor, their comparison with the studies of other Slavists, and the linguistic material available to modern researchers do not provide sufficient grounds to consider *ny an ancient form of the nominative case of the 1st p. pl. The Proto-Slavic *ny was originally a form of the accusative plural of the 1st p. pronoun. Later, in some languages as a result of the tendency to eliminate suppletivism in the paradigms of declension of personal pronouns, *my changed to *ny. This process was very old and locally limited. Most likely, the functioning of short forms of the dative and, above all, accusative cases — íû, which were used with equal frequency in Old, Middle and New Bulga- rian — had a great influence on the alignment in the paradigm of the 1st p. pl. pronoun. In Ukrainian, as in most Slavic languages, this process did not occur, which can obviously be par- tially explained by the limited functioning of the short forms in these languages.
Keywords: personal pronouns of the 1st person plural, ìè, íèå, íû, Ukrainian language, Slavic languages, history of pronoun forms.
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