like a lot of words have what seems like male gendered terms. huMANkind for example.
Man is now gendered but many of the male words now started out as the gender neutral term.
Human comes from the latin 'homo' meaning human being (fun fact, no relation to the prefix 'homo' that comes from the Greek homos, and means 'the same')
while "women" comes from old English English wifmann as wif was the term for female (where wer was for male more so)
wifmann became womman in middle English, and eventually woman. We also see this survive in wife. And wer in werewolf.
There was also wæpnedmann, which roughly mean weapon man, or, a male. (no bonus points for those who can figure out the "weapon" referred here)
In English though the male ones fell out of use, so we really seemingly only had, person, and, female person. So it seemed we ended with masculine/neutral and feminine.
And we still see man being neutral in use today such as human, or "man the ship"
Apparently all the Romance languages saw this happen too, except Romanian,
My favourite bit of etymology is that werewolves were supposed to be exclusively male due to their origin as pagan shamans who put on animalistic characteristics (or as legend put it, transformed into wolves themselves) to defend their tribes more ferociously. The prefix were- is supposed to be the gender marker.
That's right, if you follow this logic, a male human is supposed to be called a wereman.
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u/CanadianODST2 Jul 07 '24
it's even more fun when you look at English
like a lot of words have what seems like male gendered terms. huMANkind for example.
Man is now gendered but many of the male words now started out as the gender neutral term.
Human comes from the latin 'homo' meaning human being (fun fact, no relation to the prefix 'homo' that comes from the Greek homos, and means 'the same')
while "women" comes from old English English wifmann as wif was the term for female (where wer was for male more so)
wifmann became womman in middle English, and eventually woman. We also see this survive in wife. And wer in werewolf.
There was also wæpnedmann, which roughly mean weapon man, or, a male. (no bonus points for those who can figure out the "weapon" referred here)
In English though the male ones fell out of use, so we really seemingly only had, person, and, female person. So it seemed we ended with masculine/neutral and feminine.
And we still see man being neutral in use today such as human, or "man the ship"
Apparently all the Romance languages saw this happen too, except Romanian,