Re: He, she and it against hem


Ar an dara lá de mí Lúnasa, scríobh António Marques:

> Even a now genderless language* ** as English kept 3 pronouns for the
> singular, while it manages with 1 for the plural. Does anyone know of any
> language which at one time had a similar pronominal distinction, gender
> associated to sex, lost it, and lost the pronominal distinction too? (for
> instance, some IE language?)

Afrikaans still has the distinction, which was the first language I’d have
looked at. Tok Pisin
doesn’t--cf. http://www.une.edu.au/langnet/tokpisin.htm#grammar-hce .

> (*) Yes, I know, gender isn't sex
>
> (**) And to illustrate it take portuguese: every noun belongs either to the
> 'masculine' or to the 'feminine' gender. 3rd person has masculine and
> feminine pronouns, both singular and plural. However, the use of those is
> reserved for living creatures or personified objects ('don't blame my poor
> litlle car, it isn't _his_ fault'), and unacceptable otherwise. (Deictics
> have neuters, though.)
>
> Incidentally, can anyone give a sensible spelling for «'em», now we know
> it's not a reduction of 'them'?

’em is fine for spelling a reduction of “hem” ... and I wouldn’t be in a
hurry to rule out the analysis of it as a reduction of “them,” today. My
argument would be a lot stronger if I could rustle up an example of [æt] for
“that”, but right now that’s not happening.

--
Russian has no phoneme that corresponds directly to Germanic /h/. As a
result, for a not-insignificant number of people, the Second World War
involved the Soviet Union defeating Адольф Гитлер, “Adolf Gitler.”
.

Relevant Pages

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