Hi Deepstream!

> The tie-back of this to ON is that I suspect
> people used to have a very different natural
> feeling towards gender. In other words, earlier
> Germans did not use "es" unnaturally in order to
> tie out artificially to the pronoun, but because
> if felt *natural* to them to insure the pronoun
> ties to the noun if refers to.

In fact, German as you probably learned it is not really what people talk in
everydays life. German is a mixture of many different dialects and though
(most) germans can understand (most) others, there are slight differences in
the usages of some grammatical concepts.

In the village I come from usually people normally refer to a girl as "et"
or "hatt" which might be said to be "es" (or "it" in English). Also the
declined words are different ("sie" becomes something like "sai"). Of course
this is not official german, but on the other hand very few people really
_speak_ official german (unless nearly everybody writes it)...

As Kurt might know better, there are a few phrases in the different dialects
that are very close to some English or even ON sometimes...
Kurt, isn't there the expression "das Dirn" in the dialect of your area?

Regards,
Meldric

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