Isn't this the list wherein we discussed Middle English gender-neutra=
l pronouns=20
a while back but didn't find out what they were? Here's an interesti=
ng piece=20
off the Internet regarding same from a partial document on current us=
e of these=20
terms. Apparently the whole piece included references to SF works an=
d their use=20
of gender-neutral pronouns to describe androgynes.=20
Lela Buis
---------------------------------------------------------------------=
--------
(the more deeply indented part is
quoted from _Grammar and Gender_, by Dennis Baron):
The dialectal epicene pronoun a is a reduced form of the Old and
Middle English masculine and feminine pronouns he and heo. By th=
e
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the masculine and feminine
pronouns had developed to a point where, according to the OED, t=
hey
were "almost or wholly indistinguishable in pronunciation." The
modern feminine pronoun she, which first appears in the mid twel=
fth
century, seems to have been drafted at least partly to reduce th=
e
increasing ambiguity of the pronoun system....
He goes on to describe how relics of these sex-neutral terms survi=
ve
in some British dialects of Modern English, and sometimes a pronou=
n of
one gender might be applied to a person or animal of the opposite
gender....
Besides the centuries-old instinctive use of "their", people have =
been
formally concerned about the gendered pronoun problem since at lea=
st
1795, and have been coining new pronouns for about the last centur=
y
and a half. The first, sometime around 1850, were "ne, nis, nim", =
and
"hiser". In 1868, "en" appeared, followed by a rush in 1884: "thon=
,
thons", "hi, hes, hem", "le, lis, lim", "unus", "talis", "hiser,
himer", "hyser, hymer", and "ip, ips". These things come in bursts=
,
with a flurry of interest in certain circles while many try their =
hand
at neologism, then an eventual dying out, only to be revived by
another person in the future. (See the charts below.) Many more
coinings followed between 1888 and 1891, then interest died for tw=
o
decades. Interest picked up again during the thirties and forties.=
...
The whole mess is copyright =A9 1995, John Chao.
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