My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people we usually use the even more general one
The reason for that is because “se” as strictly a “thing” pronoun is artificial “book language”. When standard literary Finnish was being developed in the 19th century, its inventors wanted to have a person/thing distinction in pronouns like the “civilized” languages had, so they arbitrarily assigned “hän” as a person pronoun and “se” as a thing pronoun. That distinction is artificial, and has never stuck in spoken Finnish.
Originally there was a difference between “hän” and “se”, but it was grammatical: se was the general third person pronoun, hän referred back to the speaker (logophoric pronoun). Compare:
Antti sanoi, että se tulee. (Antti said that someone else will come.)
Antti sanoi, että hän tulee. (Antti said that he himself will come.)
The reason for that is because “se” as strictly a “thing” pronoun is artificial “book language”. When standard literary Finnish was being developed in the 19th century, its inventors wanted to have a person/thing distinction in pronouns like the “civilized” languages had, so they arbitrarily assigned “hän” as a person pronoun and “se” as a thing pronoun. That distinction is artificial, and has never stuck in spoken Finnish.
Originally there was a difference between “hän” and “se”, but it was grammatical: se was the general third person pronoun, hän referred back to the speaker (logophoric pronoun). Compare: