Did Old Norse or its parent Old North Germanic language have a gender-neutral pronoun equivalent to English's now-extinct ou? The older a form the better, in this case.
"Ou" isn't quite extinct; I've heard it a few times since moving to North West England. Despite the Danish influence, the North of England can be very conservative linguistically; the Northern Old English form of "usa" for the first person plural pronoun still survives as the very widely used "us".
(A few months ago, my daughter, who is definitely Southern and more "posh" in her speech than I am, said, "And I thought the whole idea was nobody would come up us path... I cannot believe I just said that!")
Also the genitive, as in "Ou/oo (never seen it written down) left oo's (pronounced as in "ooze") bag on' table".
(I don't really know a satisfactory way of writing this usage. I've seen "on t'table" but this doesn't express the sound at all - it's a very brief stop)
Sorry, could you tell me more about the pronoun ou? I know it only as a dialectal form of you, not as an epicene third-person pronouns (which is what I surmise you must be asking about, since all first- and second-person pronouns in English are "gender-neutral").
I can't find any mention of epicene a in the OED, although this form is listed under both the entry for he and for heo (a feminine pronoun generally replaced by she in the 11th century). Heo also yields oo in some of the dialects where it survives and it's possible it could've subsumed he there.
On the basis of this, one wouldn't expect to find an epicene pronoun in Old Norse since ou would seem to represent a Middle English innovation (not even present in Old English, let alone earlier forms of Germanic). Of course, it wouldn't be unthinkable that there exists a North Germanic variety where reduced forms of hann and hón have fallen together in the same manner.
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(A few months ago, my daughter, who is definitely Southern and more "posh" in her speech than I am, said, "And I thought the whole idea was nobody would come up us path... I cannot believe I just said that!")
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(I don't really know a satisfactory way of writing this usage. I've seen "on t'table" but this doesn't express the sound at all - it's a very brief stop)
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On the basis of this, one wouldn't expect to find an epicene pronoun in Old Norse since ou would seem to represent a Middle English innovation (not even present in Old English, let alone earlier forms of Germanic). Of course, it wouldn't be unthinkable that there exists a North Germanic variety where reduced forms of hann and hón have fallen together in the same manner.
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