[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.