Quote:
Originally Posted by funkcanna
Thanks! I don’t know why but I though that ellos referred to people only ��
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It may be a case of unconsciously applying the English rule that restricts using he/him and she/her to referring only to living beings or to personified things that have an associated biological sex or social gender, and otherwise requires using 'it'.
The Spanish rules for choosing a third-person subject pronoun or object of a preposition are different: the choice between él (ellos) = he/him/it (them) and ella (ellas) = she/her/it (them) is determined by the grammatical gender and number of the noun that names the thing(s) that the pronoun refers to.
(The neuter subject/object pronoun "ello" = "it" cannot be used to refer to something named or nameable by a noun. "Ello" can refer only to an idea or concept for which there is no equivalent noun, and often one can use a demonstrative pronoun such as "esto" or "eso" instead of "ello".)