A distributive pronoun considers members of a group separately, rather than collectively.

They include each, any, either, neither and others.

• "to each his own" — 'each2,(pronoun)' Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary (2007)
• "Men take each other's measure when they react." — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  Ralph Waldo Emerson
  Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
  
  

Biblical Hebrew

A common distributive idiom in Biblical Hebrew used an ordinary word for man, ish . Brown Driver Briggs

Brown Driver Briggs

The Brown–Driver–Briggs Hebrew Lexicon is a standard reference for Biblical Hebrew. It is organized by alphabetical order of three letter roots. It is based on the Hebrew-German lexicon of Wilhelm Gesenius, translated by Edward Robinson...

 only provides four representative examples — Gn 9:5; 10:5; 40:5; Ex 12:3.
Of the many other examples of the idiom in the Hebrew Bible

Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible is a term used by biblical scholars outside of Judaism to refer to the Tanakh , a canonical collection of Jewish texts, and the common textual antecedent of the several canonical editions of the Christian Old Testament...

, the best known is a common phrase used to describe everyone returning to their own homes. It is found in 1 Samuel 10:25 among other places.

• ... ish l'beyto.
• ... a man to his house. [literal]
• ... each went home. [sense]

This word, ish, was often used to distinguish men from women. "She shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man ," is well known, but the distinction is also clear in Gn 19:8; 24:16 and 38:25 (see note for further references). However, it could also be used generically in this distributive idiom (Jb 42:11; I Ch 16:3).

Greek

The most common distributive pronoun in classical Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

was hekastos .

External links

• Jeffrey T. Runner and Elsi Kaiser. 'Binding in Picture Noun Phrases: Implications for Binding Theory'. In Proceedings of the HPSG05 Conference. Edited by Stefan Müller. Lisbon: CSLI Publications, 2005.
• Glossary of English Grammar Terms UsingEnglish.com