In Modern English, it has only three shapes representing five word forms:[1] Historically, though, the morphology is more complex.
Old English had a single third-person pronoun – from the Proto-Germanic demonstrative base *khi-, from PIE *ko- "this"[3] – which had a plural and three genders in the singular.
Mann ("Man") was grammatically male, but meant "a person", and could, like cild, be qualified with a gender.
[5] Mark Twain parodied this grammatical structure (which exists in many languages like German) by rendering it literally into modern English:[8] It is a bleak Day.
Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and oh the Mud, how deep he is!
The hit form continued well into the 16th century but had disappeared before the 17th in formal written English.
Weather verbs such as rain or thunder were of this type, and, as the following example[16]: 208 shows, dummy it often took on this role.Gif on sæternesdæg geðunrað, þaet tacnað demena and gerefena cwealm If on saturn's-day thunders, that portends judges' and sheriffs' death
Most of the verbs used without a subject or with the dummy it belong to one of the following semantic groups:And examples still remain, such as the expression suffice it to say.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposed using it in a wider sense in all the situations where a gender-neutral pronoun might be desired: QUÆRE—whether we may not, nay ought not, to use a neutral pronoun, relative or representative, to the word "Person," where it hath been used in the sense of homo, mensch,[a] or noun of the common gender, in order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express either sex indifferently?
In my [judgment] both the specific intention and general etymon of "Person" in such sentences fully authorise the use of it and which instead of he, she, him, her, who, whom.
"[19] This usage (but in all capital letters, as if an acronym) also occurs in District of Columbia police reports.