Diachronic studies of the English x-self anaphor observe that its source is an early self-intensifier (as in the queen herself came), compounded with a pronoun. Recent work showed that the Arabic anaphor nafs-x acquires an intensifying meaning when the anaphoric convention is relatively based, suggesting a reversed process. I propose that both processes can be seen as stages in a cyclic change where the pronoun-self compounding is a stage of renewal.