Detail #165: Mergers in Person * Gender

Imagine a language in which all persons are marked for gender. Further, there are at least three social genders, which I will call i, ii and iii.

I.i, I.ii, I.iii
you.i, you.ii, you.iii
3sg.i, 3sg.ii, 3sg.iii

Let's now imagine that there's some conflations, but that these conflations are not within one person, i.e. it's not the case that 2nd person conflates genders ii and iii or somesuch - it is the persons that are conflated instead:

1/2 sg.i	1 sg.ii	1/2/3 sg.iii
	2/3 sg.ii
3 sg.i

This means if you're gender iii, you use the same pronoun you'd use for a second or even third person of your gender. This would probably either be a gender considered very expendable or interchangeable, or one where the set of members is so small that it's no problem. For the other genders, the situation obtained by this complication might be less obvious, but could imaginably have interesting cultural reasons behind them.