Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Jessica (jayeless@toot.cat)'s status on Thursday, 15-Jun-2023 15:51:27 JST Jessica

   in reply to

   • Polly

   @awitchandherdog I'm pretty sure that the Romance third-person pronouns come from the Latin demonstratives – in the Western Romance languages they come from "ille" and "illa", for example. In fact iirc, PIE didn't have third-person pronouns at all, instead using demonstratives (which, being inflected for gender, became a natural source for pronouns later!)

   • Embed this notice
     Polly (awitchandherdog@writing.exchange)'s status on Thursday, 15-Jun-2023 15:51:33 JST Polly

     I find it wild that English straight up borrowed a pronoun, 'they', from Old Norse. How often does that happen? Sure, pronouns aren't a closed class in many languages, but they definitely are in Indo-European! Are there any other Indo-European languages that have done this?

     #etymology #linguistics