He and She in Germanic languages

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vince

Senior Member
Los Angeles, CA
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Where do the 3rd person singular nominative pronouns in Germanic languages come from?

According to wiktionary, "he" is related to "here", how does that work? Is Dutch "hij" related to "here" as well? What about German "er"? Is Scandinavian "han" related to "he" or is it related to Finnish "haen"?

And what about "she"? And Dutch zij and German sie? Are they related to the Indo-European reflexive pronoun?
 
    • As far as I can tell you.
    Germanic languages belong to the Indo-European group and evolved from proto Indo-European language. In proto Indo-European there was no 3rd person singular. PIE had only first person singular and second person singular, but third person singular was demonstrative pronoun. This can be clearly seen in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit and Hittite. It is only when PIE community split up that we get different words for 3rd person singular and demonstrative pronouns. I'll come back with more.
     
    He is related to here. It all goes back to proximal demonstrative pronoun *kos, *koH and *kod. From there we get English he. The first one being masculine, than feminine and neuter. This also gives us Old High German 'he' meaning he.
     
    vince said:
    Where do the 3rd person singular nominative pronouns in Germanic languages come from?

    According to wiktionary, "he" is related to "here", how does that work? Is Dutch "hij" related to "here" as well? What about German "er"? Is Scandinavian "han" related to "he" or is it related to Finnish "haen"?

    And what about "she"? And Dutch zij and German sie? Are they related to the Indo-European reflexive pronoun?
    Click to expand...

    You can find some interesting information in the etymonline.com entries for he, she, and it. For some reason, these pronouns have had a pretty wild history of changes and substitutions from PIE to Modern English.
     
    As for German er, there's a German etymological dictionary here, and if I understand it correctly it seems to agree with what I've read elsewhere that High German (together with Gothic) gets its 3rd person pronoun mostly from a demonstrative related to Latin is, ea, id, and so it's from a different root than the other Germanic languages which show h-. The forms starting with s- are from another root and it seems that sein(er) comes from the reflexive pronoun, but the others come from another demonstrative, although I don't quite understand the explanation given for the plural having s- (since in the PIE word only the masc./fem. sing. nom. originally had s-).
     
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