"He is not a student."
Translation:他不是学生。
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1715
In modern Chinese, a character 她 has been created for she. Probably nobody use 他 to represent a female nowadays. But in older literature 他 was used for both genders.
1715
也 is just a phonetic part, added to the semantic part of 人 man/person/human.
她 was invented based on 他 when Chinese intellectuals got in touch with western languages more. The first directly related discussions are said to be about a hundred years ago. It is a relatively "young" character in Chinese.
About the phonetic property of 也 ye, we can find closer relevance to 他 in Cantonese. They are 也 ya and 他 ta respectively. Cantonese usually preserves to a larger extent old phonetic properties. Many poets that no longer rhyme in Mandarin, still rhyme in Cantonese.
Most Chinese characters have a semantic and a phonetic part. The 也 in 她 and 他 is the phonetic part, meaning these characters should probably be pronounced as yě (or something similar in a different tone).
But since there are exceptions to every rule, these make one of the exceptions. There are also others characters with the phonetic part 也 that are in no way pronounced as they “should”. This happens due to phonetic shifts through history.
141
As far as I know, this is how it goes: 他 is masculine while 她 is feminine (he, him-she, her) both are to be pronounced tā.