The Oblique Form for Pronouns: Me, You, Him, Her, It, Us, Them

These next few lessons will be focused on the oblique forms of pronouns, nouns, and adjectives; today we'll focus just on oblique pronouns. We'll get to what the term "oblique" means exactly, but I thought I'd just warn you in advance that the next few lessons may get a bit technical.

In English, when we use a preposition with a pronoun, we use the oblique form of the pronoun. For example, instead of saying, "I gave it to he", we would say, "I gave it to him" -- the oblique pronoun "him" is used instead of the pronoun "he". In Urdu, we do the same thing, except that we use oblique pronouns with postpositions instead of prepositions. Let's take a look at an example. As we've already learned, the Urdu word for "I" is "main". It doesn't make sense to say "from I" though; instead we say "from me":

• mujh se = from me

In the example above, "mujh" is an oblique pronoun. All pronouns have an oblique form, some of which are the same as their direct form (such as "aap" and "tum"). Here's a list of oblique pronouns in Urdu:

• mujh = me
• aap = you (formal)
• tum = you (informal)
• tujh = you (very informal)
• is = him/her/it (near)
• us = him/her/it (far)
• in = them (near)
• un = them (far)

Remember, you should only use the forms above when they're followed by a postposition! Otherwise, use the direct form of the pronoun instead.

So far, we only know of three postpositions in Urdu: "men", "par", and "se". The examples below also use "ko", meaning "to", which we'll cover in more detail in a later lesson.

Examples:

• aap ko = to you (formal)
• tum ko = to you (informal)
• tujh ko = to you (very informal)

• is se = from him/her/it (near)
• us se = from him/her/it (far)

• mujh par = on me
• in par = on them (near)
• un par = on them (far)