From: djohns@elm.circa.ufl.edu (David A. Johns)
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: Shaking people up with "she"? (was Re: Sexist language)
Date: 23 Dec 92 15:35:41 GMT
Organization: University of Florida, Gainesville

In article <12146@scott.ed.ac.uk> iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:

# >thf2@ellis.uchicago.edu (Ted Frank) writes:
# >>It's a shame we don't have a third-person singular the way the
# >>Finnish do.  It would be a simple solution.
# >
# >Unfortunately,
#
# Fortunately,
#
# >as soon as anyone suggests developing one, they get
# >flamed to extinction by the language purists :-}
#
# No, not by the language purists, merely by people who take language
# as a living system which follows its own laws.  If Finnish has a
# single third person singular animate pronoun rather than two, it is
# because that's how Finnish works, not because someone suggested
# developing this kind of system.

Actually, English may well have had such a system briefly at an
earlier stage.  In Old English the pronouns looked something like this
(using ":" instead of a macron for length and leaving out some common
variants):

                Masc    Fem     Neut    Plur
                ----    ---     ----    ----
        Nom     he:     he:o    hit     hi:
        Gen     his     hire    his     hi:ra
        Dat     him     hire    him     him
        Acc     hine    hi:     hit     hi:

During the Old English period the dative had already supplanted the
accusative in the first and second person pronouns (me: for mec,
etc.), so it's not surprising that the third person pronouns followed.
But what would have happened to the rest of the forms?  It's hard to
predict exactly how the vowels would have changed because these words
were often unstressed (so that some pairs may have fallen together in
unstressed position but not in stressed positions, etc.), but as a
worst case, when unstressed vowels all coalesced into schwa,
diphthongs were reduced, and long and short vowels were redistributed
according to whether the syllable was open or closed, we'd end up with
something like this:

                Masc    Fem     Neut    Plur
                ----    ---     ----    ----
        Nom     he      he      hit     he
        Gen     his     her     his     her
        Acc     him     her     hit     him

Note that animates have no gender or number distinctions in the
nominative and that as an accusative "him" is ambiguous between
singular and plural for masculines, but "her" is ambiguous for
feminines.

Inventories like this are actually attested in early Middle English,
but already in the 12th century "she" and "they" are creeping in to
replace the old pronouns, and the nominative forms are pretty well
established by the time of Chaucer.  Chaucer still uses "her" and
"hem" for "their" and "them", though, and "its" doesn't fully replace
"his" in the neuter until after Shakespeare and the King James Bible.
And, of course, plural accusative "him" lives on today in the
unstressed "em" -- which is still ambiguous with respect to "him".

So it looks like English peasants 700 years ago passed up the
opportunity to have a simple animate/inanimate system, with no clear
number distinction.

Shall we dig them up and flay them?

David Johns


Newsgroups: alt.usage.english