+42.+ Now we come to study another class of words which are also very
necessary in order to express our ideas. Suppose you had just arrived in
a strange town and you wanted to find the way to a friend's house. You
inquire of a stranger, "Can you tell me who lives in the house on the
corner?"
Notice the words _you_ and _me_ and _who_. You could not call the
stranger by name for you do not know his name, and hence you say _you_.
And if you used your own name instead of _me_, he would not recognize
it, and you would both be puzzled to find a substitute for that little
word _who_.
If you knew the stranger and he knew your name, you might say, "Can Mr.
Smith tell Mr. Jones what person lives in the house on the corner." But
this would sound very stilted and unnatural and awkward. So we have
these little words like _you_ and _me_ and _who_, which we use _in place
of nouns_. These words are called pronouns. This word is taken from the
Latin also. In the Latin the word _pro_ means _in place of_. So the word
pronoun means literally in place of a noun.
+43.+ +A pronoun is a word that is used in place of a noun.+
These pronouns are very useful little words. They save us a great deal
of tiresome repetition. Notice the awkwardness of the following:
The workers will succeed in gaining the workers' freedom if the
workers learn solidarity.
And yet this would be the way we would have to express this idea
if we did not have pronouns. Instead we say:
The workers will succeed in gaining their freedom if they learn
solidarity.
+44.+ We will study the pronoun in detail in later lessons, but we can
readily recognize these words which are used in place of nouns. The most
common pronouns are:
I
you
he
she
it
we
they
me
him
her
us
them
my
your
his
her
its
our
their
that
which
who
whose
whom
what