<Snipped quote by Heroic>
What now?
<Snipped quote by whizzball1>
First correction: no uses that you are aware of. An all-encompassing blanket statement is often false. My point is that I'm not going to dig through old books to find it because it's not worth the effort, and people actually did put in the work to find "they" in older literature. But if you can only account for one or two instances, it is likely that the rest are the alternate form. If it happened to be common throughout those works, nobody would bother to go and find each instance because they would be abundant.
As I said and cited, it corresponds to "his," despite being neutral. The neutral term merged with a masculine one.
Previous statement.
There's an issue with that argument. In the case that's mentioned, the gender is known, rendering the gender neutral term useless. However, if it's related to someone who made a food, it would be understood that the term is gender neutral if, for example, the statement was "Give my regards to whoever made the food, for he did a good job." If we knew that the host's wife made it, we wouldn't use he, similar to why we don't use it when referring to childbirth.
But if "he" was common throughout those works as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, as in the usage you mention at the bottom of your post, then it would
certainly be mentioned at some point, because it is definitely relevant to the debate about GNSPs. However, in my searches, I haven't found anyone saying that "he" was used when the gender was unknown.
Now that I fully understand what you're trying to say here, that is definitely interesting. My citation from Wagner is still relevant, that "him" said nothing about gender (except that it isn't feminine).
I notice that you keep saying "we". Yes,
we, in
Modern English, would use that, because that became natural to us after it was pushed in the nineteenth century. But the issue we're debating is--did
they of
Middle English use that?
Um. I would have continued writing that paragraph, but at this exact moment I have just realised that, in light of what you just noted, my citation from Wagner basically means that it's likely that, in Middle English, they used "him" if they didn't know the actual gender. The problem still remains that we don't have any literary references from that time attesting to this, and this understanding is an inference based on the personal pronouns of that time, but it's enough to make me rethink my position, as I mentioned in my response to Blitz, because I can't reasonably contradict you without stretching my interpretation of my citations.
