Pronouns

[mmcirvin]

Speaking of male and female pronouns, I just found this interesting little history of the words "he" and "she" on Michael Quinion's World Wide Words site, the response to an insightful question from an 8-year-old. It turns out that there was a period in the 12th century, while English as we know it was still coalescing, in which it had no separate masculine and feminine subject forms for its third-person pronoun; men and women were both "he" because the Old English female pronoun "heo" was no longer pronounced differently. But this wasn't a fully gender-neutral third-person pronoun like some languages have, since the object forms "him" and "her" had not converged; and eventually the word "she" appeared.

Comments

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

it's been a while since I took old english (roughly 1100 years,) but I seem to recall that the singular third person feminine had forms pretty much identical to the third person plural -- it could appear as either "heo" or "hie" for either one ... and the genitive was the same for both ("hira"). our modern third person plural comes from norse. thank you, vikings! Lindesfarne may have been worth it, after all!

the only way to tell whether you were talking about a feminine plural noun (not necessarily a woman) or a plural noun was through the verb conjugation.

too bad we lost the first and second person dual pronouns, eh?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Actually I think I remember seeing it written "hie" in Beowulf.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

possible... I haven't read Beowulf in the original (that would have been third semester, but I didn't get that far.) we were taught to use "heo" for "she" and "hie" for "they" when conjugating, with the warning that this was an imaginary distinction.

I know the Adventures of Matt and Andy in the City of Cannibals used "hie" = "they", since I had to memorize a couple sentences from that. "And hie sendan hlot him betwenum..." ("And they cast lots between themselves...")

hmmm, I just thought of something. since people today are using third-person plural in place of the singular (when gender is unknown,) and since as a consequence some people are using third-person plural when they know full well the gender of the person they are talking about, but are embarassed to admit it, everything's come full circle. sort of.