$a59] Pronouns 119 many pronouns the parent Indg. language had and what forms they had assumed at the time it became differentiated into the various branches which constitute the Indg. family of languages. The difficulty is rendered still more complicated by the fact that most of the pronouns, especially the personal and demonstrative, must have had accented and unaccented forms existing side by side in the parent language itself; and that one or other of the forms became generalized already in the prehistoric period of the individual branches of the parent language. And then at a later period, but still in prehistoric times, there arose new accented and unaccented forms side by side in the individual branches, as e. g. in prim. Germanic ek, raek beside ik, mik. The separate Germanic languages generalized one or other of these forms before the beginning of the oldest literary monuments and then new accented beside unaccented forms came into existence again. And similarly during the historic periods of the different languages. Thus, e. g. the OE. for I is ic, this became in ME. ich accented form beside i unaccented form, ich then disappeared in standard ME. (but it is still preserved in one of the modern dialects of Somersetshire) and i came to be used as the accented and unaccented form. At a later period it became ī when accented and remained 1 when unaccented. The former has become NE. I, and the latter has disappeared from the literary language, but it is still preserved in many northern Engl. dialects, as i. In these dialects i is regularly used in interrogative and subordinate sentences; the ME. accented form ī has become ai and is only used in the dialects to express special emphasis, and from it a new unaccented form a has been developed which can only be used in making direct assertions. Thus in one and the same dialect (Windhill, Yorks.) we arrive at three forms : ai, a, i, which ire never mixed up syntactically by genuine native dia-