Читать книгу A Book of Middle English - J. A. Burrow - Страница 36

There were minor changes in the masculine and neuter pronouns. The masculine had an unstressed nominative form a, ‘he’, as in 7b/201. The accusative hine was rapidly superseded by the dative form him; The Peterborough Chronicle already uses him as direct object, and it is universal by the fourteenth century.

In the neuter, genitive his was occasionally replaced by hit (e.g. 8/12, 11/ 309); the modern form its does not appear until the end of the sixteenth century. The dative neuter form him was also sometimes replaced by hit, but more commonly a periphrasis with ‘there‐’ was used to avoid it altogether; e.g. þarmid þu clackes, ‘you clack with it (your bill)’, 2/81; leyd þeron, ‘applied to it (harping)’, 5/30.