Personal & Demonstrative Pronouns
Pronouns are used so constantly, in every language, that they tend to resist the tidy regular patterns Lessons 6–8 taught you — this lesson's paradigms are the most irregular you've met so far, but also among the most frequent words you will read. This is the longest lesson in the course to date; take it in two sittings if you need to.
ahaṃ, "I," and tvaṃ, "you"
Both pronouns decline for case exactly like nouns do, but with their own irregular set of endings rather than following any of the classes from Lessons 6–8. Each also has short, unstressed enclitic forms — me, te, no, vo — used constantly in place of the full accusative/dative/genitive forms, especially in verse and in casual speech, the way English "'em" stands in for "them."
ahaṃ — "I / we"
| Case | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | ahaṃ | mayaṃalso amhe |
| Accusative | maṃenclitic: me | amheenclitic: no |
| Instr. / Abl. | mayā | amhehi |
| Dative / Gen. | mayhaṃ, mamaenclitic: me | amhākaṃenclitic: no |
| Locative | mayi | amhesu |
tvaṃ — "you"
| Case | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | tvaṃ | tumhe |
| Accusative | taṃenclitic: te | tumheenclitic: vo |
| Instr. / Abl. | tayā | tumhehi |
| Dative / Gen. | tuyhaṃ, tavaenclitic: te | tumhākaṃenclitic: vo |
| Locative | tayi | tumhesu |
There is no vocative form for personal pronouns, for the obvious reason that you don't address someone as "you!" any more naturally in Pāli than in English — a proper name or noun (like the bhikkhave you learned in Lesson 8) does that job instead.
The Demonstrative ta-: Pāli's Only Third Person
Pāli has no separate word for "he," "she," "it," or "they." Instead, the demonstrative stem ta- ("that") does double duty as the third-person pronoun — the same word means either "that [person/thing]" or simply "he/she/it/they," and English translators choose whichever reads more naturally. Unlike ahaṃ and tvaṃ, ta- declines for all three grammatical genders from Lesson 5.
Masculine and Neuter
These two genders share every case except the nominative and accusative — worth noticing as one pattern rather than two separate ones to memorize.
| Case | Masc. sg. | Neut. sg. | Masc. pl. | Neut. pl. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | so | taṃ | te | tāni |
| Accusative | taṃ | taṃ | te | tāni |
| Instrumental | tena | tehi | ||
| Dative / Gen. | tassa | tesaṃ | ||
| Ablative | tamhāalso tasmā | tehi | ||
| Locative | tamhialso tasmiṃ | tesu | ||
Feminine
| Case | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | sā | tāalso tāyo |
| Accusative | taṃ | tāalso tāyo |
| Instr. / Abl. | tāya | tāhi |
| Dative / Gen. | tassāalso tassāya | tāsaṃ |
| Locative | tassaṃalso tāyaṃ | tāsu |
Confirming tassa, at Last
Lesson 4 glossed tassa, in Namo tassa bhagavato..., as "to him" without yet being able to say what kind of word tassa actually is. You now can: it is the masculine dative/genitive singular of the demonstrative ta- — exactly the form in the table above. "Homage to him" was not a loose paraphrase; tassa is, quite literally, this pronoun's dedicated way of saying "to that one" — and because the following three words (bhagavato, arahato, sammāsambuddhassa) are all in agreement with it in the same case, number, and gender, the whole phrase reads as one tightly bound unit: "to Him — the Blessed One, the Worthy One, the Perfectly Awakened One."
Notice that the masculine plural nominative/accusative of ta-, te ("they/those"), is spelled identically to the enclitic te from the tvaṃ table above ("to you," unstressed). These are two completely unrelated grammatical facts that happen to sound and look alike — Pāli, like English ("bank" of a river vs. a "bank" that holds money), tolerates this kind of coincidence and simply relies on context to sort it out. You will meet a handful of collisions like this across the course; noticing them explicitly, as here, is more useful than being caught off guard by one mid-sentence later.
Practice: Identifying the Pronoun
- tassa dhammo — "___ teaching." Which English pronoun, and what case/gender/number is tassa?
- te bhikkhū — "___ monks." What is te here (not the enclitic!) — case, gender, number?
- ahaṃ vadāmi — "___ speak." Case and number of ahaṃ?
- detha me — "Give ___." What is the enclitic me standing in for here?
Check your answers
1. "His teaching" — tassa is masculine genitive singular of ta-.
2. "Those monks" — te is masculine nominative plural of ta-, agreeing with the plural noun bhikkhū.
3. "I speak" — ahaṃ is nominative singular.
4. "Give (to) me" — me here is the enclitic accusative/dative of ahaṃ.
Continuing From Here
Lesson 10 completes the pronoun system with the interrogative stem ka- ("who? what? which?") and the relative stem ya- ("who/which, that...") — the pair that lets you build questions and the "the one who..." clauses that appear throughout the Visuddhimagga's own question-and-answer structure, the same seven-question format you first saw in the Sīlaniddesa translation.