УРОК 34

GRAMMAR COMMENTARY

34.1. First Person Personal Pronouns

As has been repeatedly emphasized, one of the most fluid elements of the grammatical structure of Old Chinese is the system of personal pronouns. In the late preclassical period, a radical restructuring of this system occurred, which consisted not so much of the emergence of new pronouns as of a change in the principles of their grouping.

While in the archaic and early preclassical languages ​​there was a clear distinction between personal pronouns, used as subjects and objects, and possessive pronouns, which served as attributes of nouns, this distinction disappeared by the 7th–6th centuries BC, and new personal pronouns such as 予 yú, 爾 ěr, and others became capable of acting as attributes.

Personal pronouns in the classical language can serve all three of the above-mentioned functions. However, they have some features that distinguish them from the pronouns of the pre-classical period. These features relate to first-person pronouns.

The most commonly used personal pronouns of the classical period are 我 wǒ and 吾 wú.

Both 我 wǒ and 吾 wú can be used as subjects, sometimes even in the same sentence. For example, in Lesson 35, Song Keng says of himself: 吾聞秦楚構兵,我將見秦王 wú wén qín chǔ gòu bīng, wǒ jiāng jiàn qín wáng "I heard that Qin and Chu are preparing for war; I will meet with the Chu king."

There is no discernible difference in the use of 吾 wú and 我 wǒ as attributes. Compare: 今日我疾作 jīn rì wǒ jí zuò "Today my illness has worsened." 彼以其富,我以吾仁 bǐ yǐ qí fù, wǒ yǐ wú rén "Others rely on their wealth, I on my philanthropy."

However, unlike 我 wǒ, the pronoun 吾 wú very rarely functions as an object. Thus, it never appeared in this function in the treatise “Mencius”.

Table 4
Frequency of First-Person Pronouns as Functions of Various Sentence Parts in the Mencius

	Subject	Addition	Definition	Total
我 wǒ	55	54	37	146
吾 wú	73	—	40	113

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