Who may be either masculine or feminine; which and what may be of any gender.
165. The objective whom often begins a question (as in the third example in [§ 163]). Care should be taken not to write who for whom.
166. Which and what are used as interrogative adjectives.
- Which street shall I take?
- What village is this?
167. The interrogative adjective what may be used in a peculiar form of exclamatory sentence. Thus,—
- What a cold night this is!
- What courage he must have had!
What! by itself often serves as an exclamation: as,—“What! do you really think so?” In this use what may be regarded as an interjection.
168. In parsing pronouns the following models may be used:—
1. He was my earliest friend.
He is a personal pronoun of the third person. It is in the masculine gender, the singular number, and the nominative case, being the subject of the verb was.