The pronoun αὐτός as the third-person pronoun
The designation “personal” for personal pronouns is connected to the idea of “person” as a feature of verbs: that is, first person, second person, and third person, just as we use those terms for verbs. For these pronouns, gender and number have a relationship with person. First person (“I” in the singular and “we” in the plural) and second person (“you”) personal pronouns, which we will learn in a later module, are understood to have grammatical gender corresponding to embodied gender of the person or persons they are referring to.
Third person pronouns (“he, she, it” in singular, “they” in plural) in ancient Greek have different forms in the singular of grammatical gender depending on the gender (grammatical or embodied) of the person or thing referred to. That is, grammatical gender of nouns will be reflected in the grammatical gender of the pronoun that refers to it.
Pronouns are among the words in English that still have cases. We have a “subjective” case of pronouns that is like the nominative: I, we, he, she. The “objective” case of pronouns is used for objects of verbs or objects of prepositions, and so that is what we will use for the “oblique” cases (a category covering the genitive, dative, and accusative cases) in ancient Greek: me, us, him, her, them. In English, we no longer have distinctions for the second person in cases, just as with number: “you” is used in all cases and numbers. In the third person, “it” is also used for both the subjective and objective cases.
Forms of personal pronoun for third person, singular and plural
The personal pronoun for the third person is αὐτός, αὐτή, αὐτό. It has masculine, feminine, and neuter forms. Compare English pronouns “he, she, it.” It declines with regular second declension endings in the masculine and neuter (with the exception of the neuter singular nominative and accusative αὐτό) and with first declension endings in the feminine. The persistent accent is on the ultima and follows that pattern, having an acute on the nominative and accusative forms and a circumflex on the genitive and dative forms.
The nominative forms are not used as personal pronouns, to mean simply “he, she, it, they.” Recall that ancient Greek does not need a nominative pronoun since the verb form contains that information about the person and number of the subject. (This pronoun has two other uses that we will learn later for which the nominative is used.) So the following introduces only those cases and forms that are used for the pronoun in the oblique cases “him, her, it, them.”
| Case | Singular | Plural | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Masc | Fem | Neut | Masc | Fem | Neut | |
| Genitive | αὐτοῦ | αὐτῆς | αὐτοῦ | αὐτῶν | αὐτῶν | αὐτῶν |
| Dative | αὐτῷ | αὐτῇ | αὐτῷ | αὐτοῖς | αὐταῖς | αὐτοῖς |
| Accusative | αὐτόν | αὐτήν | αὐτό | αὐτούς | αὐτάς | αὐτά |