The word "人家" is formed by directly combining the character for "person" (人) with the character for "house" or "home" (家). This literal combination creates the core concept of "a person's household", which then naturally extends by metaphor and common usage to represent the people belonging to that household, "others" or "other people". This sense of an external, separate household is further abstracted to allow it to refer indirectly to a specific "someone else", and, in a nuanced shift, to be used as a soft or self-deprecating way for a speaker (often female) to refer to themselves, evoking a sense of belonging to a social unit separate from the listener.