''He'' () is a
third-person,
singular
personal pronoun (subject case) in Modern English.
The reconstructed Indo-European language provides a demonstrative pronoun ''ko''.'Ko' , ''The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'', Fourth edition, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000).
Speakers of Old English (OE) considered each noun to have a grammatical gender — masculine, feminine or neuter.Peter S Baker, ''Introduction to Old English'' , (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Pronouns were generally (but not always)Greville Corbett, ''Gender'', (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). selected to have the same grammatical gender as the noun they referred to. For example, ''dæg'' (, ''day'') was masculine, so a masculine pronoun was used when referring to a day or days. The personal pronoun for a singular masculine subject was written ''he'', just like Present-Day English (PrDE). However, OE ''he'' was probably pronounced like PrDE ''hay'' (). The vowel in ''hay'' is normally longer in duration than in the exlamation ''Hey!'' (). Because the vowel sound of OE ''he'' was long in duration, scholars (and OE dictionaries) now write it as ''hē''.
There was one change to the inflection of the masculine pronoun in Middle English. The OE dative form ''him'' replaced the OE accusative ''hine'' (). This meant that, in Middle English, there was no distinction between masculine and impersonal, except in the subject case of the third-person singular, until ''it'' from ''hit'' replaced ''him'' in the object case of the impersonal. So, "there was rather an extended period of time in the history of the English language when the choice of a supposedly masculine personal pronoun (''him'') said nothing about the gender or sex of the referent."