A while ago I made an algorithm to swap the gender in fairy stories.
(Genderswappedstories.com)
And I found another English weirdness trying to swap between his/him and her/hers.
Him always swaps to her
Eg it was him - it was her
But his can swap to her or hers
It is his -> it is hers
It is his thing -> it is her thing.
And her can also swap to him or his
It was her -> it was him
It was her thing -> it was his thing
And hers always swaps to his.
So hers and him are the only completely predictable - and they don’t even mean the same thing!
I had to write a very in-depth algorithm to work out the type of words surrounding the words - if they are nouns, adjectives etc - in each sentence to correctly guess the swaps. But even after that some were unpredictable due to word order keeping the important words apart. all I could do 100% reliably was to flag the ones that might be ambiguous to check. Of course now I could just get an LLM to check it!
Historically speaking, it seems to have been due to two independent coincidences:
• The falling together of object pronoun her and possessive her seems to date back to Old English, where the genitive and dative cases were both hire. I’m unsure how this originated, but they seem to be separate in Frisian (the closest relative of English) and were reconstructed as separate in Proto-Germanic, which suggests that it was due to regular sound change in the evolution of Old English.
• Later, it seems like the third person possessive pronouns were derived by adding ’s to the corresponding genitive forms (which ended up as the possessive determiners). So her became hers, but it had no effect on his, since that already ended with an ⟨s⟩.
Thus we end up with the paradigm of:
| | subject | object | poss pronoun | poss determiner |
|---+---------+--------+--------------+-----------------|
| M | he | him | his |
| F | she | her | hers |
jonplackett · · focus · HN ↗
(Genderswappedstories.com)
And I found another English weirdness trying to swap between his/him and her/hers.
Him always swaps to her
Eg it was him - it was her
But his can swap to her or hers
It is his -> it is hers
It is his thing -> it is her thing.
And her can also swap to him or his
It was her -> it was him
It was her thing -> it was his thing
And hers always swaps to his.
So hers and him are the only completely predictable - and they don’t even mean the same thing!
I had to write a very in-depth algorithm to work out the type of words surrounding the words - if they are nouns, adjectives etc - in each sentence to correctly guess the swaps. But even after that some were unpredictable due to word order keeping the important words apart. all I could do 100% reliably was to flag the ones that might be ambiguous to check. Of course now I could just get an LLM to check it!
Can anyone explain why this happens?
bradrn · · focus · HN ↗
Historically speaking, it seems to have been due to two independent coincidences:
• The falling together of object pronoun her and possessive her seems to date back to Old English, where the genitive and dative cases were both hire. I’m unsure how this originated, but they seem to be separate in Frisian (the closest relative of English) and were reconstructed as separate in Proto-Germanic, which suggests that it was due to regular sound change in the evolution of Old English.
• Later, it seems like the third person possessive pronouns were derived by adding ’s to the corresponding genitive forms (which ended up as the possessive determiners). So her became hers, but it had no effect on his, since that already ended with an ⟨s⟩.
Thus we end up with the paradigm of:
jonplackett · · focus · HN ↗