Hisn, Hern, Yourn, Ourn

Hello there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi there. How are you? I’m John Spaulding. I’m a poet in Tucson, Arizona.

Super cool. A poet from Tucson. Well, we’re glad to have you, John. What’s up?

Well, I was calling about my grandfather, who is long gone, but he grew up in a small town in Vermont, Sharon, Vermont, actually.

And he had some peculiar ways of talking.

And one of the things that I remember him talking, it was when he said, instead of his and her, he said his and her and your and our, like there’s an N on the end of the word instead of like an S might be.

And I never thought anything about it.

But as I’m remembering him, I remembered that.

And I just thought it was kind of peculiar.

I think if anybody else in my family had used those words, we would have probably thought him or her a hick from the sticks.

But because he was my grandfather, nobody challenged him on things.

Not that he was that dominant or anything, but he was, you know, well-loved.

And anyway, I was just interested in whether you could enlighten me about where he might have picked that up.

It’s like a possessive of a pronoun that is, you know, maybe at one time it was popular,

But even when I was growing up, I can’t remember anybody else saying those words.

So for an example, he might say, those cattle are hisen, or that house is heren.

Yeah, exactly.

Just like you would say his and hers, but not put the S on it.

You’ll get in older usage manuals, people making negative judgments about this.

But in modern usage manuals and in modern linguistics texts, it’s very clear that we’ve come to discover what these are as archaic forms that have somehow held on in pockets of the United States and Canada and the UK.

Because you will find places in all three regions where these pronouns are used.

And we know why they’re used and we know where they came from.

They originated in Middle English, so 400 or 500 years ago.

I wondered about that.

Yeah.

By analogy with mine and thine, that house is mine and that car is thine, something like that.

Oh, it’s weird to talk about a car and use thine.

That wagon is thine.

They themselves come from Old English.

They were used in what’s called the absolute position.

And possessive forms in the absolute position stand on their own, is a noun phrase, and they don’t need to be followed by a noun.

So the books are mine.

So I don’t have to say mine books, you know.

But to be more specific about this, they developed from Old English, they developed into Middle English, and there were spellings for a time of hisen, H-I-S-E-N, or ouren, O-U-R-E-N, youren, theiren even, heren.

And all of these were done by analogy to be more consistent with mine and thine, because my and thy were used before a noun, and mine and thine were used without one.

So just people do this.

They regularize language and create new forms based on models of consistencies that they see elsewhere in the language.

Really? Wow. I wondered if it was kind of a throwback or something like that.

But wow, it goes all the way back to Old English, right?

Yeah, yeah. Various forms, but strongly in Middle English.

And again, so these pockets last.

And when somebody calls you a hick for speaking like this, what they’re really saying is that you just have a dialect form.

They’re just saying that you have a way of speaking that isn’t mainstream.

And it’s not about lack of education.

It’s not about ignorance.

It’s not about being illiterate.

It just simply means that you have hung on to an older form that most people have dropped.

Right.

Yeah, I know.

And people judge, or at least when I was growing up, people judge people on the basis of language so much.

They, you know, put people in categories that they don’t belong in anymore.

I hope we’re more enlightened than that.

I mean, nobody criticized him, but I think it was because he was a patriarch in our family.

Yeah.

John, thank you so much for an interesting question.

Oh, it’s been great talking to you.

All right.

Call us again sometime then.

All right.

Sure.

Thanks again.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, John.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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