  Priscian made a strong connection between the proper name and the pronoun (pronomen), saying that the pronoun is taken in place of a proper name. It also has a kind of primacy over the proper name. As Priscian said, even if we know that Virgil is a man and a poet, we won’t be able to identify him (assuming we are in his presence) unless someone says “This is Virgil.”  The type of pronoun we are interested in here is what medieval grammarians called the primitive (non-derived) demonstrative pronoun, which includes personal pronouns such as ‘I’ and demonstratives such as ‘this’. Demonstration (construed as ‘pointing to’) can be either direct, when something is before one’s eyes, or intellectual, or a mixture of the two.  Leaving aside intellectual demonstration, which occurs when an object is incorporeal or absent (see §8), we can note that the use of a demonstrative pronoun in normal circumstances has the implication that the object pointed to must be present to the speaker.