 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 for 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 heo into sh. 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 heo to heo. Then the hea moved forward in the mouth towards the palate, becoming hy, as in the way modern English HUGE is sometimes pronounced. And finally, the hy becomes a sh. Although we don't normally formulate sound change rules that are applicable only to one word, there is evidence of a few place names that have undergone a similar shift, such as the Old Norse named Heltland becoming Shetland. And though this theory doesn't explain the vowel shifting from O to A, which would later become modern English E, we could imagine the change happening by analogy with the pronoun he. Another suggestion is that she didn't come from Old English heo at all, but instead from seo, the feminine form of the Old English demonstrative say that seo, also the source of modern English that and the. The idea being similar to the first theory, with sa becoming seo, and then the short jump from that to show, though that still leaves the problem of the vowel. But another interesting proposal rests on the fact that Old English heo changed to become close to A in late Old English and early Middle English, thus making heo, she, sound virtually the same as he. And in order to disambiguate these and not have the he's and she's mixed up, they started to use seo for she instead. Which remember would have had the same vowel sound as he, so say. But then that leaves the problem of why se becomes sh, since we can no longer count on that ye or hy sound coming between them to pull it towards the pallet 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.