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Eugine Nier's avatar

> Language change typically happens unconsciously over generations, but when we look at it from a distance, it sometimes fools us into thinking the language is making choices. And when I say that the language “cares about“ grammatical distinctions, I’m flirting with being fooled myself. But if we understand this idea that languages make choices, metaphorically, we can see the success of she as something like the result of one of these choices — the choice to preserve what was seen as a crucial grammatical distinction.

You can see a similar process today with English's attempt to generate a new second person plural pronoun.

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Raphael Solomon's avatar

In Hebrew, the thrird-person singular pronouns, written in our characters are:

Hoo (masc.) and Hee (fem.)

Since I know that Semitic languages are not even Indo-European, I realize that any such connection would be a stretch. Nevertheless, I just wanted to put it out there.

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