The third person articles/pronouns of Common originally fit a relatively simple matrix of four cases and two genders. Davidson thought through some idiomatic aspects of this system - for example, the requirement for paucal agreement for any exactly counted quantity. Today, however, there is much underlying idiomatic complexity that we will explore in this article.

Davidson seems to have assumed the usage of the original, basic forms for such diverse types of nouns as inanimate objects, animate objects, people, collections, swarms, and continuous substances would be relatively self-explanatory, and didn't flesh this out in detail in the early form of the language. While he did help guide later development in the early period, this approach to design left a certain void that later speakers filled in a much less neat and tidy way. Where today the language has lost its gender distinction and developed a definite/indefinite distinction that was never part of its original design, we have moved a long way from Davidson's original, clean matrices.

As a point of clarification, in referring to these points as 'idioms', we do not mean that they are slang, or lower class Common. In this article, except where otherwise noted, we are talking about the accepted usage of modern High Common, that you will find in the speech of careful, articulate speakers and in very formal writing.

Use as Pronouns

All Common articles are also able to serve a pronouns. According to Davidson himself, in the history he invented for the language that informed his design, the articles are supposed to have actually evolved from pronouns. In good, classical Common, the rule is that any article can be used by itself as a pronoun, but only if there are no modifiers associated with it. If there are any modifiers, the syntactic structure of Common requires a 'dummy head term', 'yn' to be used. So, for example, starting with the explicit sentence:

Ja paluh te lawf a synti pikki.
The dog is chasing the black cat.

This could shorten to:

Ja paluh te lawf a.
The dog is chasing it.

If you wanted to bring back the modifier, the dummy head term 'yn' would be needed:

Ja paluh te lawf a synti yn.
The dog is chasing the black one.

The 'yn' doesn't mean specifically 'one', it's just a syntactically-required dummy that could stand for literally anything.

That's very proper, classical High Common, but the thing is, with third person pronouns, native speakers of Common are not comfortable with sentences like the first example, where the sentence or clause ends with a bare pronoun. They will tend to move it, or else put in the dummy head term 'yn', even then the formal rules of Common don't require it. Look at the following examples:

Ja paluh tene lawf we.
The dog chased me.

Ja paluh tene lawf zu.
The dog chased you.

*Ja paluh tene lawf a.
The dog chased it.

The first two examples feel completely acceptable to High Common speakers, although the second example would actually require an honourific to be polite, unless to an intimate or inferior. The interrogative/uncertain pronoun 'ko' is also able to comfortasbly appear alone. The third example, however, in practice would tend to be changed to one of the following:

Ja paluh a tene lawf.
Ja paluh tene lawf a yn.
Ja paluh tene lawf.

These three sentences mean the same thing and both are considered good style in High Common, where a sentence ending in a bare pronoun, while officially grammatical (linguistically speaking, though, it may not be, since native speaker intuition seems to go against it consistently), is considered bad style. The verbal auxiliary 'tene' indicates the presence of a direct object, so the best form is perhaps the third where the direct object is not mentioned at all.

Taking this point beyond very correct High Common and into colloquial speech, however, many speakers are not comfortable with a bare third person pronoun in any position and will always insert the 'yn'. Furthermore, in less careful speech, the 'yn' tends to get shortened to apostrophe-n after the singular article if there is no modifier in the bracket to break it up. So you will see colloquial forms like:

Ja paluh a'n tene lawf.
Ja paluh tene lawf a'n.

These forms are not considered good High Common and will never appear in formal writing, except in dialog in fiction where colloquial speech is being rendered, but these forms can be heard in the casual speech of even very educated and careful speakers, especially in the latter word order, and this usage is definitely on the rise. This usage appears to be evolving into a special pronominal form of the third person article.

Possessive Pronouns and Objects of Prepositions

Common has no explicit possessive forms, but has a very popular idiom for expressing possession, the null preposition possessive, which has the effect of making the nominative case function like a possessive form. There are some particular idioms to pay attention to when using this form with nominative articles as bare pronouns, especially in the third person, related to the above point about native speakers' discomfort with bare third person pronouns. Take the following examples:

A ponet wen se an etyl.
My nose is red.

A ponet zun se an etyl.
Your nose is red.

*A ponet na se an etyl.
Its nose is red.

The first and second examples scan as perfectly acceptable to native speakers (barring again the informality or rudeness indicated by the lack of an honourific in the second example). However, despite the fact that grammar books say the third example is perfectly acceptable, native speakers tend not to be comfortable with it. In idiomatic Common, there will be a tendency to omit the possessive whenever possible, and to throw in the dummy head term 'yn' even though the formal rules of the language say it isn't needed. In real sentences, you will see:

A ponet se an etyl.
A ponet na yn se an etyl.
A ponet na'n se an etyl.

Actually using a head term will also be a popular option. The third example is colloquial - again, you will often hear it in casual speech, but never see it in writing.

The exact same tendency is seen in cases where a nominative pronoun is the object of a preposition - unsurprisingly, since the posessive is just a special case of this where the preposition happens to be the null preposition.

To the gatekeepers of the language, this tendency with possessives and objects of prepositions is apparently much more aggravating and objectionable than the analogous occurrence with verbal arguments, because while the latter seems to get a pass, the former is inveighed against in formal grammars and style guides, which instruct people to write A ponet na se an etyl even though everyday speakers don't seem to find it comfortable. This pushback from the language mavens does not seem to be slowing the advance of these forms, however.

Idioms of Definiteness and Number

Davidson laid down certain idiomatic uses of certain combinations of person and number, but left others for the speaker community to figure out. Also, in Davidson's time, the definite/indefinite distinction did not exist, so he did not address that at all. In this section, we will give a rundown of the forms and their idiomatic senses and then go into more detail as needed.

In these tables, we will list only the numbers and talk about their idiomatic meaning in isolation from case as much as possible. The absolutive form is given for each row.

As you can see, in the first person, number gets conflated and supplanted by clusivity in the paucal and plural. This was part of the original design of the language and has persisted robustly in the modern High and Low dialects, for the most part.

All of these second person pronouns are very rude, informal or intimate without a head term - 'sy' is a minimal, safe head term that people use to avoid this, but there are many others depending on relative rank, etc. Unlike in many European languages, using a higher number to refer to a person respectfully is not a mechanism employed in Common. You use the appropriate number of the number of people addressed with an honourific instead.

Like the first person, the second person has a degree of conflation between number and clusivity.

Next we will look at the third person forms, starting with the interrogative/uncertain form 'ko'. 'Ko' is used to form all of Common's expression that are equivalent of WH- question words in English, and also to express ideas like 'whichever', essentially rhetorical questions. 'Ko' has a significant usage outside of just asking questions. The basic rule of 'ko' is that every time it is used, it expressed uncertainty and demands a response, either actually or rhetorically. The number of 'ko' should always match the number in the demanded response.

We get into greater complexity in the interpretation of number when we get into the definite and indefinite third person article/pronouns, especially the indefinite, which was one of the last major realignments of Common's grammar to take general root and remains one of the most tenuous and subject to dialectal variability. Here we will describe the 'best' High Common usage.

The fact that English has definite and indefinite articles can fool us into thinking that the use of articles is clear, intuitive and universal. They are, in fact, one of the trickiest elements for learners of any language that has them, as you will discover if you study a different language with the same distinction, like French. Languages can differ as to which nouns require articles and which don't, when you use the definite versus the indefinite, whether they are required when something else like a numeral that can serve as a determiner is present, and so on.

In Common, an article is always required, there is never an instance that you can have a noun without an article, even for the names of people and places. There are a very limited number of articles, other things like numerals and demonstratives which would be determiners in other languages are modifiers in Common and still require an article. Also, Common seems to have never quite gotten comfortable with the indefinite and tends to default to definiteness more than we see in languages like English. The indefinite is widely used, but Common speakers seem to look at it that if there's an opportunity to use the defintie, they will do so. The major exception to this is negative expressions.

There will be a lot more to say about the idioms used with definite versus indefinite, and there are a lot of peculiarities that essentially just have to be memorised. There are, however, some general patterns.