Re: Apical pronoun in english?

Christophe wrote:
>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").

I was going to mention Indonesian "ia ~ dia", which is epicene but would be
hard to adapt to Engl. phonology-- but now this Du. "die" has
possibilities--- Nom. [di:], Gen. [di:z] or [dIz], Oblique [dIm].

OTOH this might reduce the Mills family to giggles--- way back in the late
40s, when my sister and I were young and not very respectful, we met a
friend of our grandmother, a gent of Danish origin IIRC.  He used [di:] for
3rd pers. sing/ plur/ nom/gen/obl., and we thought it was hilarious.