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From: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: net.women,net.nlang
Subject: Re: The closed class of pronouns
Message-ID: <515@psivax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 20-Jun-85 19:19:14 EDT
Article-I.D.: psivax.515
Posted: Thu Jun 20 19:19:14 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Jun-85 02:36:12 EDT
References: <290@wuphys.UUCP> <678@sphinx.UCHICAGO.UUCP> <300@wuphys.UUCP>
Reply-To: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Pacesetter Systems Inc., Sylmar, CA
Lines: 35
Xref: watmath net.women:5998 net.nlang:3234
Summary: 

In article <300@wuphys.UUCP> bsc@wuphys.UUCP (Bryan Coughlan) writes:
>
>     Let's take a look at the "closed class" of personal
>pronouns:
>
>		Singular	Plural
>
>1st person         I             We
>2nd person        You            You (Y'all!)
>3rd person       He,She          They
>
>     The third person singular is the only form without
>a gender neutral pronoun.  Why should this be so?
>Well, when the class was set up, women were considered
>by everyone to be second-class citizens.  Thus, when in
>doubt, the default gender was male.  Since then, things
>have changed to the point where women are actually
>considered to be first-class citizens (I hope!).  I
>think that this is a big enough change in society
>to open up the pronoun class to include a new one.
>
	Actually, this is incorrect. The system was set up so that
the singular anaphoric pronoun agreed with its antecedent noun in
*grammatical* gender, which originally was only loosely tied to
biological gender. Thus, the "masculine" form was the default,
when the antecedent gender was unknown, because masculine nouns
were more common than other classes. Its "dominance" is an accident
of grammatical history. (Note that German still uses these pronouns
in the old, grammatical manner).
-- 

				Sarima (Stanley Friesen)

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