Re: Apical pronoun in english?

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> Dutch has found a good solution for the problem: "die": "that one", common
> gender. It's used extremely often in speech, even in cases where the gender
> of the person is actually known, and it fits well because it is *not*
> neuter (the neuter form is "dat"). Seen how often it' used, I think we can
> say that Dutch has developped a true epicene third person singular pronoun.
> Yay for the Dutch! :)) (note however that I doubt they developped it out of
> concern for gender equality. It just happens that with its sound changes
> Dutch lost nearly all morphological marks of gender in masculine and
> feminine nouns - they share a single definite article "de", identical
> adjective agreement forms, etc... - Masculine and feminine nouns have just
> collapsed into a single "common" gender, at least in form. And people began
> to forget whether a noun is masculine or feminine. Still they needed a
> third person pronoun to refer to all those nouns, and they couldn't
> remember whether to use "hij" or "zij". So using "die" came only naturally,
> since it was already of the right gender, but didn't differentiate between
> masculine or feminine. I think Scandinavian tongues have also seen the
> collapse of masculine and feminine nouns together as one common gender.
> Have they also used the same strategy to provide people with a common third
> person singular pronoun?)
Can only speak for Swedish.

Outside animates, masc and fem have collapsed almost completely, and the new
pronoun _den_, originally a demonstrative I think, has replaced the masc/fem
ones. With humans, only the masc and fem pronouns are used (unless the human
is refered to with a neuter noun, in which case you get neuter _det_). Using
_den_ to refer to a human of unknown sex is wrong according to my
Sprachgefühl. I usually use _han eller hon_, _honom eller henne_, _hans eller
hennes_, which are admitedly awfully long and clumsy.

                                                           Andreas