feminine he feminine he ouch ! no doubt about it , pronouns and gender are touchy topics . robert millar ( in metaphorically slapping me around a little in the ad hominem mode ) makes some good points but mistakes my focus a bit , misspeaks my findings somewhat , and misstates the fuller design of my position a lot . his linguistic list vol-6 - 835 ( 22 jun 1995 ) responds to my vol-6 - 806 ( 12 jun 1995 ) . i don ' t mean to say that , as robert millar attributes , " 's he ' entered english as a whole suddenly at the advent of printing " - - puhleeeze . i do mean to say that the h - stem feminine suddenly , after printing begins , disappears forever from the written record . my broader conclusion is that the h - stem feminine was alive for centuries beyond the oed 's orthodox-view account of its purported demise . i don ' t discount the sh - forms during the periods when and in the regions where they are amply attested . far be it . i do , however , maintain that the " significant " cause , in the overview , for the disappearance of the h - stem feminine was , not that it began to resemble phonetically the masculine , but rather the standardizing force of printing ( the motive for this is a separate question ) . and , too , there is the telling evidence that spoken pronoun use is often quite different from written . and i am suggesting that some of the oe h - stems survived in speech beyond printing 's seeming signal of their demise . the late survival of the h - stem feminine has the implication for socio / political linguistics that 18th century grammarians , regarded during these past decades as androcentric ( for having written down the " he rule " ) must be admitted to not have been so - - " he " is the principal thrust of the androcentric argument , right ? i am tempted to apologize for my insensitivity to other people 's faculty for correctness . in this case , it resulted in robert millar suffering mood swings - - feelings he shared with us - - his sorrow , his anger , regarding my position . my intention was not to academically abuse or linguistically victimize anybody . but despite his mood swings , we may all nonetheless benefit from his hot flashes of insight appropriate to his rejoinder to my native morphology of singular " they " hypothesis . but i will not continue the " they " discussion here , however , so 's not to detract from the late survival of the h - stem feminine presently under discussion , and indeed much more the hot topic . robert millar says that he suspects that i only have a slight understanding of dialect diversity , and that my discussing material from _ piers plowman _ and _ ayenbite of inwyt _ is a way to " circumvent . . . lalme , mcintosh and samuels . " first i would suggest that he provide fuller citations , this for the benefit of those on the list who concentrate in other areas of linguistics than this subject ; and second i would like to make available to him and anybody else some of my charts resulting from my indexing and sorting all the citations for all the forms for all the third person pronouns in the oed . m . l . samuals , " dialects and grammar , " in _ a companion to piers plowman _ ( ed . , john a . alfred , 1988 ) , specifically identifies by dialect nine of the seventeen manuscripts of the a - version of _ piers plowman _ . these are the ones that had already been identified in kane - donaldson , 1960 ( _ piers plowman , the a - version _ , george kane ) , after generations of effort . the book is a momentous compendium that in my thinking was conceived with the intention of making work such as mine possible . i use the seventeen manuscripts of the a - version of _ piers _ as the mainstay of my argument . samuals is unable to identify the dialects in nearly half the manuscripts of piers . i specifically focus on _ piers _ because it is a manageable corpus that anyone can go and check for themselves . _ piers _ is a great source for studying diverse forms because the forms are all variations on the same text . where can one find such a wealth of data for comparative analysis ? and piers can also be considered the first highly " popular " work in medieval english , and for this reason , the scribes , in copying the work for their intended audiences , would tend to avoid esoteric , literary , and archaic forms . the " cult of auctoritas " is the conservative emulation of older forms by the copying scribe . robert millar alludes to this to explain the h - stem feminines found in manuscripts of _ piers _ . i have met with this criticism before . i will make available to anyone who wants them particular lines as found in all seventeen manuscripts , and rather than the conservation of forms , the contrary of the auctoritas principle seems to be found in _ piers _ , whereby the scribes , in copying from the original , tended to modify it to regional conventions . i am not saying that auctoritas was not in many instances of medieval scribal practice the rule . i ' m saying that looking at lines of _ piers _ , through the seventeen manuscripts , sees in them a tremendous diversity . and even so , the use of the h - stems in all the manuscripts - - assuming for the sake of argument they were not in colloquial use - - indicates that they were well known , nonetheless , does n't it ? robert millar reads between my lines that i consider the anglo - normans as " wicked . " not so . chronocentrism in the reading of history is as inimical to reason and human understanding as is ethnocentrism in the reading of culture . he holds to the orthodox view and says that " the rising london standard spread much more rapidly than it ever would have done in an age of purely manuscript culture . " but would n't the london " standard " better be called the status dialect . it is mistaken to assume that writing , before and after printing , reflected how people generally used language day-to - day . most people talk like _ i love lucy _ and _ the honeymooners _ , not like _ the new york times _ . today , for example , the indefinite / proverbial " he " is primarily a written status form ; the singular " they " a spoken form . i think it is very safe to assume that then , just as now , there is a common english and a status english within a particular regional dialect . it is on the basis of this assumption , coupled with evidence for the widespread knowledge of the h - stem feminine in the generations before printing , that i am postulating the late survival of the h - stem feminine . anybody who would like to have my charts showing the " persistence " of all the feminine and masculine h - stem forms from the 11th century on , comparative exhibits of lines through the seventeen manuscripts of _ piers _ , pronoun paradigms from the same manuscripts , and perhaps a few other items - - they are available for a dollar copy charge and two stamps for usa . jeffrey weber , 2843 n . spaulding ave . , chicago , illinois , 60618 , usa . this current transmission is more an aside than the summary that will be forthcoming . i have received an excellent critique from wittysan ( sean ) , which he sent also to robert millar , and would be happy for the asking to share it and my response as this inquiry continues .