PRONOUN, a part of speech which takes the place of the noun, to avoid too frequent of the noun or to designate an object ile name is not known or, if known, is not desirable or available for use. Pronouns have the same properties as nouns, viz.: gender, per son, number and case. It differs from the noun in this, that whereas the noun stands always for some definite object or concept or class of concepts, for example, Chicago, man, house, the pronoun may stand now for a given con cept or class of concepts; but again for a totally different one; thus the pronoun has no fixed denotation: eit" may stand for (Chicago," or °horse," or euniverse." A usual classification of pronouns divides them into those personal (I, thou, he, she, it) ; demonstrative (this, that), interrogative (who? which? what?), possessive (my, thy, his, her, hers, its, our, ours, your, yours, their, theirs), relative (who, what, which, that), and indefinite (any, aught, some, each, every, other, etc.): but the demonstratives and the indefinites do not, as a rule, fall under the definition of pronoun. Worthy of note is
the general going out of use (at least in polite society when equals address equals) in all modern languages, of the personal pronoun (and its possessive) of the second person singular, thou, thy, thine and the substitution for it of the second person plural or (in Ger man) the third person plural or of a form signifying eyour worships or the like. Consult Amyot, C. J. B. 'De la Nature des Pronouns) (Paris 1856) ; Goebel, K., 'Die Grarnmatischen Kategorien) (in Neue Jahrb. fur das Klassische Altertuns Geschichte, and Deutsche Liter oho., Series HI, Vol. V, Leipzig 1910) ; La Grasserie, D. de, 'De la Veritable Nature du Pronoun) (in 'Etudes de Grammaire Compare,' Louvain 1:::) ; Maetzner, E., 'An English (3 vols., London 1874) ; Owen, E. T., 'A Revision of the Pronouns) (in Wis consin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, Translations, Vol. XIII, p. 1, Madison 1901).