Daily Archives: June 7, 2021

The LSA’s podcast “Subtitle” discusses the closest language to English, Frisian: The language closest to English

The LSA podcast “Subtitle” has a very interesting discussion of the introduction of the Swedish 3rd person singular gender neutral pronoun “hen”. This is likely a borrowing from Finnish “hän”. It was discussed by a linguist in the 1950s and … Continue reading →

The use of “they” as a gender-neutral 3rd person singular pronoun has a long history going back to Middle English (see the OED entry for “they”, def. AI2). This article refers to some early 20th century attempts to deal with … Continue reading →