English Language & Usage Asked by Anthony D'Arienzo on May 25, 2021
“That” can be used both as a pronoun and as a conjunction. For example,
I know that it is raining.
Give me that.
This is unique to English as far as I know. In French and Spanish, for example, the two uses of “that” are distinct (c.f. “que” vs. “ça”). Looking online, this is true for non-romance languages as well.
Is there evidence that English originally had two words for “that”, depending on its context, but the words eventually merged? Wiktionary suggests such a merger would have occurred before the development of Old English.
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