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I know what nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives are. But are Mitch, Australia, Eiffel Tower, Adventure World, etc. simply nouns or are they something else? The explanation I get from dictionary.com is that they are simply nouns, but I remember back in primary school (the only time we ever spent learning any punctuation and grammar) a teacher once said they were something different. I know that for sure but I've forgotten what she said.
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Pronouns stand in for nouns so you don't have to use the noun repeatedly.
I is not the name of me; Ruth is. But if Ruth (I) said Ruth (I) was doing all these things, Hatrack (you) might get tired of hearing Ruth's (my) name all the time.
Also, nouns aren't relative, whereas pronouns are. Eiffel Tower will always refer to the structure in France, regardless of perspective. But if I say I, it means Ruth. If you say I, it means you, not me. Does that make sense?
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Ay, it does. But is there a logical reason why it (I) is capitalized and other pronouns such as he or she, which are also referring to proper nouns which are normally capitalized, aren't?
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There's nothing about pronouns that says they must be "unspecific". "I" is a pronoun because it stands in for the speaker, so we don't have to keep referring to ourselves by name all the time. There's another one--"we". It's the plural version of "I".
As for why "I" is capitalized, I seem to remember reading that it's because it's only one letter long. This caused confusion for early typesetters, or perhaps scribes back when everything was copied longhand, who weren't always sure whether the "i" was supposed to stand alone or be included in another word. (The spellings of words weren't fixed in those days, remember, so it wasn't unusual to have letters in them, based on local pronunciations perhaps, that we wouldn't recognize today as belonging there.) So it was capitalized to make it stand out. Or something like that.
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I me my mine you your yours He him his she her hers It its we us our ours they them their theirs
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My favorite proper noun is: Jehosophat, which I probably spelt wrong. Its so much fun to say. Jehosophat. Ha, I could say that for hours.
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We used to. 'Thou' used to be the singular second person subject, and 'thee' was the object, leaving 'you' for the second person plural, I believe.
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quote:Originally posted by Dr Strangelove: Ay, it does. But is there a logical reason why it (I) is capitalized and other pronouns such as he or she, which are also referring to proper nouns which are normally capitalized, aren't?
I isn't specific; it can refer to anyone who is talking about themselves. And Verily's right about the capitalization thing—it was done to avoid confusion in manuscripts because it originally looked like one short stroke with no dot.
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