1286: Locative Pronouns Jun 18, 2018

Pronouns, both personal (e.g. 'he' and 'you') and relative (e.g. 'that') are one of the last places where grammatical case may be found in English. Sometimes the distinction is simply subject-possessive-object such as 'I-mine-me' or 'who-whose-whom', but there is more to this. The fairly obscure and usually only literary or found in certain expressions 'hence; thence; whence' (meaning 'from where') and 'hither; thither; whither' (meaning 'to where'), which follows the same patter as 'here; there; where', are the best and possibly only cases where there is locative displayed morphologically in English. Most of the time, speakers rely on prepositions like 'to' or 'from', and this is the case with the relative pronouns to in that most of the time people say 'to there' rather than 'thither', but it is still very occasionally used.
Make sure to check out the new Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/MuEqaI7W0hA
Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.