Some theories about the mysterious etymology of the pronoun "she" in English, to add to the information in our video "Nation"    • How the Origin of "Nation" Connects t...  

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Transcript:
Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can’t fit into the main videos! Today, some extra bits of information from my video about Nation — and if you haven’t seen that yet, click on the card.
In that video I mentioned the mysterious origins of the English pronoun she. Here’s a fuller description of the various theories of where she came from. One is that a sound change happened that turned the /h/ of hēo into /ʃ/. As this theory goes, sometime in the transition from Old English to Middle English, the diphthong altered with the first part of the sound becoming shorter, so from [he:ə] to [hjo:], then the [hj] moved forwards in the mouth towards the palate becoming [ç] as in the way Modern English huge is sometimes pronounced, and finally the [ç] becomes [ʃ]. Although we don’t normally formulate sound change rules that are applicable to only one word, there is the evidence of a few placenames that have undergone a similar shift, such as the Old Norse name Hjaltland becoming Shetland, and though this theory doesn’t explain the vowel shifting from /o:/ to /e:/ (which would later become Modern English /i:/), we could imagine the change happening by analogy with the pronoun he. Another suggestion is that she didn’t come from Old English hē at all, but instead from sē, the feminine form of the Old English demonstrative se, þæt, sēo meaning “that”, also the source of Modern English that and the, the idea being similar to the first theory, with [se:ə becoming [sjo:], and then the short jump from that to [ʃo:], though that still leaves the problem of the vowel. But another interesting proposal rests on the fact that Old English ē [e:ə changed to become close to [e:] in Late Old English and Early Middle English, thus making hēo “she” sound virtually the same as hēo “he”, and in order to disambiguate these and not have the hes and the shes mixed up they started to use sē for “she” instead (which remember would have had the same vowel sound as hē, so [se:]), but then that leaves the problem of why [s] became [ʃ] since we can no longer count on that [j] or [ç] sound coming between them to pull it towards the palate as we did in the first theory.
As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!