Pronouns, case and person

English pronouns conserve many traits of case and gender inflection. The personal pronouns retain
a difference between subjective and objective case in most persons (I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us,
they/them) as well as a gender and animateness distinction in the third person singular
(distinguishing he/she/it). The subjective case corresponds to the Old English nominative case, and
the objective case is used both in the sense of the previous accusative case (in the role of patient, or
direct object of a transitive verb), and in the sense of the Old English dative case (in the role of a
recipient or indirect object of a transitive verb).[168][169] Subjective case is used when the pronoun is the
subject of a finite clause, and otherwise the objective case is used.[170] While grammarians such
as Henry Sweet[171] and Otto Jespersen[172] noted that the English cases did not correspond to the
traditional Latin based system, some contemporary grammars, for example Huddleston & Pullum
(2002), retain traditional labels for the cases, calling them nominative and accusative cases
respectively.