[wizofaus]

How do you say it was a "he-said-she-said argument" then? ;) Actually it's often occurred to me pronouns didn't need to be gendered but we should have different pronouns for "the 1st aforementioned person" and "the 2nd aforementioned person". Not sure if any languages do.

Edit: maybe ASL? https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

[mostlylurks]

It's very informal and I'm not sure how widely spread it is outside of the Helsinki region, but at least least here in the Helsinki region, you can also use demonstrative pronouns (tää (= this), toi (= that)) as third person pronouns in certain specific circumstances to further specify how the people referred to in the conversation relate to you, the speaker, and whoever the listener happens to be. So you can have people A,B,C conversing, with D present but not participating in the conversation, and E not present but being discussed, and A can tell B "this told that that it/he/she did something" and it will be understood as "C told D that E did something". Not the exact distinction you were asking about, but it's another related axis of distinction in pronouns that I thought might be interesting enough to mention here.

[wizofaus]

English definitely needs better pronouns, but I have no idea how you can introduce them. We can't even agree on what cases you can use "they/their/them" for an individual person! One thing you do occasionally hear people doing if they don't want to repeat full names and need to disambiguate pronouns is to refer to people by the first letter of their name ("John told Adam J wasn't the right person for A"), but obviously that won't work if you don't know their names.

[housecarpenter]

There are languages like that---the distinction is referred to as "proximative" vs. "obviative". (Though strictly speaking, it differentiates between "more topical" and "less topical" third persons, which might not necessarily correspond with the order in which they're mentioned.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obviative Apparently, there's even an Algonquian language which has a "further obviative" too, thus distinguishing three different levels of topicality.

[Ndymium]

I would use the idiom "sana sanaa vastaan", i.e. "word against word" for that situation.

[ardacinar]

Not Finnish, but in Turkish (another language without gendered pronouns) I'd use something like "o ne dedi bu ne dedi" (what did that say, what did this say)

I'd guess Finnish has more than one demonstrative pronoun, too :)

[CRConrad]

> (what did that say, what did this say)

> I'd guess Finnish has more than one demonstrative pronoun, too :)

One of the most common ways to do that in Finnish is talking about how "One (did something) and the other (did something else)"... With the only tiny little problem being that the Finnish for both "one" and "the other", in this context, is "toinen"!