Family law

The twenty-ninth entry is la gestation pour autrui, and the last word is a pronoun English has no single piece for. Autrui means other people taken together, and it obeys one rule that decides every sentence it appears in: it never stands as a subject. It turns up after a preposition or as an object and nowhere else — pour autrui, le bien d’autrui, au détriment d’autrui, penser à autrui, nuire à autrui. The reason is old grammar rather than style, because autrui began as the oblique form of autre, the shape that word took when it was not the subject of its sentence, and it has kept that one job while losing everything else. It has no article, no plural and no feminine. So a sentence that starts from other people has to change word altogether: French writes les autres pensent le contraire and never autrui pense. In English « others » moves freely between subject and object without changing shape, which is exactly why this habit has to be learned rather than guessed.