Subject: feminine-he , singular-they

content - length : 8133 dear language scholars . i am presenting the following material as a discussion item . one of my ultimate purposes is to contribute to the revised oed due out in 2005 . for a paper i am currently working on , i ' m requesting comments and contributions . a summary will be forthcoming . feminine-he and singular-they mine is a new set of explanations for the two most regularly discussed grammatical oddities of english : indefinite / proverbial he and singular they . ( i will also touch on them and their . ) the orthodox view of pronoun history ( for she , they , them , their ) involves the north-to - south " wave theory , " as stated as early as 1866 by richard morris . it is the theory that is set forth in the oed and has never been questioned . the feminine h - stem , according to this accepted view , was displaced in the language in a wave of cultural diffusion when the feminine pronunciation began to approximate that of the masculine pronoun in the 12th and 13th centuries . the other pronouns discussed here also involved the north-to - south waves of diffusion . my contention is that the significant cause for the historical replacement of these pronouns ( except for the h - stem subject plural ) was the standardizing force exerted by the printing press - - it happened rather quickly - - not waves of cultural diffusion over centuries . in my analysis of the seventeen manuscripts of the a - version of piers plowman , the h - stem feminine is found with great regularity . how can this be explained ? in many lines , the occurrences in the manuscripts of h - stem feminines outnumber the sh - forms found in the same lines . many manuscripts use both forms . the manuscripts are copies of copies of copies . on the bases of the manuscripts that have been dated , i place the " average " manuscript within a few generations of the advent of printing . my explanation , perhaps the anglo - norman rulers had a predilection for a distinction in the masculine / feminine singular . while the folk generally used the bi-gendric " egalitatian " h - stem form in the vernacular , the more politically correct sh - form was preferred at oxford / cambridge , in proper social etiquette , and in writing when referring to a " lady . " when caxton began his enterprise , the sh - form ( as well as the others spoken of here ) became enforced as the correct form through the great power of the press . and the h - stem feminine remained known in the spoken language , alongside the sh - form , well beyond printing . it had not dropped from speech and become archaic by 1300 . when the " prescriptive " grammarians prescribed indefinite-he , this h - stem still carried in its semantic domain a bi-gendric reference . although the seventeen manuscripts of piers is my main corpus of evidence , there are various kinds of other evidence to support my theory for the late survival of the h - stem feminine in the colloquial of the middle ages . one of the more interesting is the existence of the h - stem feminine in gullah ( when and if west african origins are discounted ) . other supporting evidence can be found in various places in the oed . it is scanty and scattered , but nonetheless there . h - stem and sh - form feminines existed for centuries , side by side , as formal and informal , although , for sure , in many cases the distinction was lost . " hi was a fair wifman " is found in the mid - 14th century agenbite of inwyt ( i am currently translating this work ) . in it , the pronunciation of the feminine pronoun is the same as the modern masculine ! ( the vowel had not yet diphthongized ) . the supposition that this h - stem is a " literary form , " as suggested by the oed ( presumably this means copied in manuscript from an earlier exemplar ) is untenable because the agenbite was translated directly from french . i have extracted the pronoun paradigms from all the manuscripts of the a - version of piers . in addition to the great evidence for the wide use of the h - stem feminine centuries beyond its supposed demise , the h - stem plural ( although extremely rare ) can also be found ( in line prologue 63 it is used to satisfy alliteration ! ) . and in every manuscript of piers the h - stem obliques ( modern them and their ) are to be found ( often alongside the th - forms ) . and then , in a generation after printing , the h - stems for she , they , them , and their seem to vanish ! ! , at least from the written evidence . the h - stem feminine held wide currency in the colloquial of the middle ages and therefore , supported by other evidence , was not unknown to the prescriptive grammarians a few centuries later . the accepted theory that the h - stem feminine dropped from the language before 1300 , prior to the time the poem " alysoun " was written , is in need of revision . piers shows it to have been very much alive in the 15th century . an explanation for the replacement of the h - stem plural nominative by they , a replacement occurring earlier than the other pronouns in question , has never been proposed . would n't there have been pressure for some alternative to the oe h - stem subject plural as a result of the disappearance of the preterit plural during this period ? because the english verb lost its marker in the preterit for number , the h - stem plural ( which shared the same form with the feminine singular nominative ) became in some contexts ambiguous for number . a new form was needed . although a norse form may have reinforced it among northern speakers , there was a native singular form available from the same set of oe demonstratives that gave us the . the and they appear to be duplets . if this is so , then the singular morphology of they is in fact historical and has been alive in the colloquial for a very long time ! ! the , in oe a singular , developed as a singular / plural ( the car / cars ) , extended to the accusative , but lost its absolute ( stand-alone ) use . they , retaining the pronunciation of oe the , was restricted to the nominative , and became the unambiguous written plural by 1400 - - but in the colloquial it retained also its singular morphology . later , in regard to them and their , caxton used the th - forms as the unambiguous plurals because the h - stems for these pronouns had throughout england a tremendous diversity of forms . for example , in one ( written ) dialect her would be a feminine / singular / possesive , in another it would be an all-genders / plural / possesive . caxton needed forms that would be universally understood , hence the written th - form obliques replaced the h - stems in an historic blink of the eye - - not in a wave of cultural diffusion that coincidentally wafted through london at the time caxton set up his print shop . a well supported case can be made for the late survival of the h - stem feminine , into the 15th century , and hence a case for its cultural currency at the time of the prescriptive grammarians . if this is so , the exclusion of one gender from " cognitive space " would not apply , and hence the motives of these grammarians would have to be reassessed . if in fact the sapir - whorf hypothesis does apply to pronouns , then i invite comment to help me understand two facts . 1 ) that for two-thirds of the history of english the subject pronoun used to refer to a group of men / boys was a form that was identical to the feminine singular ; and 2 ) the expression by a pronoun of " possessing " something by men / boys was also for two-thirds of the history of english expressed by a form that was morphologically marked for feminine but not masculine .
