Man history of word

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This article is about the word «man». For adult males, see Man. For other uses, see Man (disambiguation).

The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann- «person») and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age. In traditional usage, man (without an article) itself refers to the species or to humanity (mankind) as a whole.

The Germanic word developed into Old English mann. In Old English, the word still primarily meant «person» or «human,» and was used for men, women, and children alike.^[1][2] The sense «adult male» was very rare, at least in the written language. That meaning is not recorded at all until about the year 1000, over a hundred years after the writings of Alfred the Great and perhaps nearly three centuries after Beowulf.^[3] Male and female gender qualifiers were used with mann in compound words.

Adopting the term for humans in general to refer to men is a common development of Romance and Germanic languages, but is not found in most other European languages (Slavic čelověkъ vs. mǫžь, Greek ἄνθρωπος vs. άνδρας, Finnish ihminen vs. mies etc.).

Etymology[edit]

According to one etymology, Proto-Germanic *man-n- is derived from a Proto-Indo-European root *man-, *mon- or *men- (see Sanskrit/Avestan manu-, Slavic mǫž «man, male»).^[4] The Slavic forms (Russian muzh «man, male» etc.) are derived from a suffixed stem *man-gyo-.^{[citation needed]}

In Hindu mythology, Manu is the name of the traditional progenitor of humankind who survives a deluge and gives mankind laws. The hypothetically reconstructed Proto-Indo-European form *Manus may also have played a role in Proto-Indo-European religion based on this, if there is any connection with the figure of Mannus — reported by the Roman historian Tacitus in ca. AD 70 to be the name of a traditional ancestor of the Germanic peoples and son of Tuisto; modern sources other than Tacitus have reinterpreted this as «first man».^[5]

In Old English the words wer and wīf were used to refer to «a male» and «a female» respectively, while mann had the primary meaning of «person» or «human» regardless of gender. Both wer and wyf may be used to qualify «man»; for example:

God gesceop ða æt fruman twegen men, wer and wif
(then at the beginning, God created two human beings, man and woman)^[6]

These terms are also used to qualify compounds; wifmann (variant wimman) developed into the modern word «woman». Wæpned also meant «male», and was used to qualify «man»: wæpnedmann (variant wepman, «male person»). There was also the term wæpenwifestre, meaning either an armed woman, or a woman with a penis.^[7] These terms were not restricted to adults; Old English also used wæpnedcild and wifcild, literally «male-child» and «female-child».^[8][9] The Old English wer may survive today in the compound «werewolf» (from Old English werwulf, literally «man-wolf»).^[10] See wer.

Some etymologies treat the root as an independent one, as does the American Heritage Dictionary. Of the etymologies that do make connections with other Indo-European roots, man «the thinker» is the most traditional — that is, the word is connected with the root *men- «to think» (cognate to mind). This etymology relies on humans describing themselves as «those who think» (see Human self-reflection). This etymology, however, is not generally accepted. A second potential etymology connects with Latin manus («hand»), which has the same form as Sanskrit manus.^[11]

Another etymology postulates the reduction of the ancestor of «human» to the ancestor of «man». Human is from *dhghem-, «earth», thus implying *(dh)ghom-on- would be an «earthdweller». The latter word, when reduced to just its final syllable, would be merely *m-on-^{[citation needed]}. This is the view of Eric Partridge, Origins, under man. Such a derivation might be credible if only the Germanic form was known, but the attested Indo-Iranian manu virtually excludes the possibility. Moreover, *(dh)ghom-on- is known to have survived in Old English not as mann but as guma, the ancestor of the second element of the Modern English word bridegroom.^[12] However, there may have been a single lexeme whose paradigm eventually split into two distinct lexemes in Proto-Germanic. Moreover, according to Brugmann’s law, Sanskrit mánu, with its short a, implies a PIE reconstruction *menu- rather than *monu-, which would lead to an expected but not attested cognate **minn- in Proto-Germanic.^[13]

In the late twentieth century, the generic meaning of «man» declined (but is also continued in compounds «mankind», «everyman», «no-man», etc.).^[14] The same thing has happened to the Latin word homo: in most of the Romance languages, homme, uomo, hombre, homem have come to refer mainly to males, with a residual generic meaning. The exception is Romanian, where om refers to a ‘human’, vs. bărbat (male).

The inflected forms of Old English mann are:^[15]

The inflected forms of Old High German word for man (without i-mutation) are:^[16]

The inflected forms of the Old Norse word for man, maðr, are:^[17]

Modern usage[edit]

The word «man» is still used in its generic meaning in literary English.

The verb to man (i.e. «to furnish [a fortress or a ship] with a company of men») dates to early Middle English.

The word has been applied generally as a suffix in modern combinations like «fireman», «policeman» and «mailman». With social changes in the later 20th century, new gender-neutral terms were coined, such as «firefighter», «police officer» and «mail carrier», to redress the gender-specific connotations of occupational names. Social theorists argued that the confusion of man as human and man as male were linguistic symptoms of male-centric definitions of humanity.^[18]

In US American slang, man! also came to be used as an interjection, not necessarily addressing the listener but simply added for emphasis, much like boy!, and similarly, dude!

Also, in American English, the expression «The Man», referring to «the oppressive powers that be», originated in the Southern United States in the 20th century, and became widespread in the urban underworld from the 1950s.

Use of man- as a prefix and in composition usually denotes the generic meaning of «human», as in mankind, man-eating, man-made, etc. In some instances, when modifying gender-neutral nouns, the prefix may also denote masculine gender, as in manservant (17th century). In the context of the culture war of the 2000s to 2010s, man was introduced as a derogatory prefix in feminist jargon in some instances,^[19] in neologisms such as mansplaining (2008) manspreading (2014), etc.

See also[edit]

• Were
• Names for the human species
• Last man
• Gender neutrality in English
• Manu and Yemo

References[edit]

The title will probably be recognized at once: it is part of the last line of Kipling’s poem “If.” Unfortunately, Kipling’s only son John never became a man; he was killed in 1918 at the age of eighteen, a casualty of his father’s overblown patriotism. Our chances to reach consensus on the origin of the word man are not particularly high either.

Like a host of other researchers, I have my pet theory concerning the origin of man and made it public several years ago, but the unsuspecting public has passed it by (or perhaps the malevolent world only feigned indifference). This circumstance and the habit of the Internet to recycle with pomp and authority discarded explanations would not have induced me to fight (re-fight) an old battle, but it so happened that, while looking through my post on the etymology of wife, I noticed a question about Latin vir “man,” which I have never answered, and a suggestion that the word wife might have something to do with the idea of covering the female during sex rather than hiding the bride’s face under a veil during the wedding ceremony. This conjecture seems unlikely to me not only because it has no support among the words for wife in the languages of the world (I cannot find an analog of the woman being called this for the reason proposed) but also for linguistic reasons; it fails to account for the neuter gender of the ancient word. I should also repeat what I have said many times in the past. Comments are always welcome. However, when they are offered long after the appearance of the post but appear on the page for that post, I may never see them, for, obviously, in preparation for my monthly “gleanings” I cannot be expected to look through more than five hundred essays on the off-chance that something new has turned up somewhere. The hayrick is huge, and the needle is all but invisible. So please, whatever your suggestions may be, use the rubric “Comments” after the most recent posts.

Before coming to the point (and, among other things, discussing the query about Latin vir), I should repeat very briefly what I once wrote about wife. Wife at one time meant “woman,” not “female spouse,” as it still does in midwife, fishwife, old wives’ tales, and the like. Numerous etymologies of this word have been offered, but none of them could explain why the noun denoting “female” was neuter, as German Weib “woman” still is: das Weib. Without overcoming this grammatical difficulty, we will get nowhere, so I suggested that our word once designated a group of people belonging to a woman’s kin and containing the root of the pronoun we and a suffix (Indo-European –bh, as in the name of the Scandinavian family goddess Sif). Later, I reasoned, the word began to be applied to an individual female but retained the gender of the ancient collective noun.

Details can be found in the old post and in my long 2011 article. Here they are relevant only in so far as my reconstruction of the history of man bears some resemblance to what I think was the origin of wife. For comparison, I can refer to the scholarship on the word god (see a series of fairly recent posts devoted to it). In Germanic, only the plural (neuter plural!) gods existed. At one time, the gods were viewed as a multitude; the concept of a singular god dates to a much later period. The Scandinavians distinguished between two divine families: the Æsir and the Vanir. They had no trouble calling Thor an As and Frey a Van (the Icelandic spelling has been simplified) and did not need a term for “god in general.”

Words like man and woman testify to a high level of abstraction. Boy and girl, male and female are different. When a baby comes into the world, its sex must be defined, so that a label is needed. J. Hammond Trumbull, an American anthropological linguist of the past epoch, noted that man as an individual homo is untranslatable into any Native American language, for “distinction is always made between native and foreigner, chief and counselor, male and female,” and so on. From the modern point of view, the world of our ancestors was overclassified and tended to avoid abstractions. Therefore, while reading old literature, we notice with surprise or amusement that everything and everybody has a name. A sword, a cauldron, a rock—nothing remained nameless. It was practically impossible to say “A tall farmer carrying an ax walked past a lake with his son,” for one expected something like: “A tall man called William carried the ax Hewer and was seen walking with his son Jack past Lake Fishpond.” Although man did once refer to a homo (as follows even from the English word woman, originally a compound: wif + man), this must have been a later development. In searching for the etymology of man, we should have a clear picture of what we are trying to find.

Not only Germanic man presents great difficulties. No hypothesis on the origin of Greek ánthropos, familiar to us from anthropology “the study of man,” and Russian chelovek (stress on the last syllable) can be called fully satisfactory. Latin vir fared better. Vir is most likely related to vis “force, strength; a large quantity,” yet that is all we can say with certainty. Incidentally, vir had a Germanic cognate, and its traces are still discernible in the noun world, an ancient compound wer + eald “the time of man.” Under the circumstances that have not been fully clarified, the temporal reference gave way to the spatial one, namely “the place where people live.” A more exotic compound is werewolf “man-wolf,” a popular character from old stories, someone who assumes a wolf’s shape and behaves like a wolf. Those interested in this subject should consult works on lycanthropy (Greek lycos means “wolf,” and ánthropos has been mentioned above). Only homo seems to be transparent. Language historians are agreed that homo is akin to Latin humus “ground.” If this conclusion is correct, the word reflects the notion that humans were made from soil.

Engl. man has related forms in all the Germanic and numerous non-Germanic Indo-European languages. The most interesting of them is the name Mannus, mentioned by Tacitus, according to whom Mannus was a god venerated by the “Teutons.” Unfortunately, no myth about this deity has come down to us, but Tacitus is a reliable source. Also, it is possible that such tribal Germanic names as Alemanni and Marcomanni retained the vestiges of the cult of Mannus (more tangible traces of this cult have also been found), but perhaps manni is the Latinized plural of the word for “man.” In any case, Mannus cannot be ignored in the search for the origin of the word man. The grammatical affiliation of that word presents serious difficulties. Here we should only take into account the circumstance that in the Old Germanic languages every noun belonged to some declension. Occasionally the forms vacillated between two declensions, but the recorded forms of man show traces of four or even five declensions. Apparently, the speakers felt most uncertain about how to use that noun.

The best-known Germanic word for “man” was guma, which sounds like Latin homo, and indeed the two must have been related. Is there a connection between homo ~ guma and man? An old etymology combined them and produced the protoform ghmonon, a good but rather improbable hybrid. A hundred and fifty years ago scholars often yielded to what might be called the Indo-European temptation. Thus, girl, probably a rather late borrowing from Low German, in which it had no respectable parentage, was once traced to ghwerghw, a cross between the German noun and Greek parthénos “woman.” One shudders at the thought that the primitive ghmonon called his baby girl ghwerghw. But then what do we know?

To be continued.

Image credits: (1) Old Slavic pagan stone statue. (c) tiler84 via iStock. (2) John Lockwood Kipling and Rudyard Kipling circa 1890. University of Sussex Library Special Collections. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (3) The Bride by Gertrude Kasebier, 1902. Public domain via WikiArt.

Английское слово

Термин человек (от Протогерманский * mannaz или * manwaz «человек, человек») и слова, производные от него, могут обозначать любую или даже всю человеческую расу независимо от их пола или возраста. В традиционном использовании термин «человек» (без артикля) относится к виду или к человечеству (человечеству) в целом.

Германское слово превратилось в древнеанглийское man, mann означает в первую очередь «взрослый мужчина-человек», но во вторую очередь способно обозначить человека неопределенного пола, «кого-то, одного» или человечества в целом ( см. также древнескандинавский maðr, готический манна «человек»). * Mannaz или * Manwaz также является протогерманским реконструированным именем м-руны ᛗ. Более ограниченными английскими терминами для взрослого мужчины были wer (родственное: латинское vir; выживает как первый элемент в «оборотне») и guma (родственное: латинское homo; выживает как второй элемент в «женихе»).

Принятие термина для человеческого вида для обозначения мужчин является общей чертой романских и германских языков, но не встречается в большинстве других европейских языков (славянских čelověkъ против mǫžь, греческий ἄνθρωπος против άνδρας, финский ihminen vs. mies и т. д.).

Содержание

• 1 Этимология
• 2 Современное употребление
• 3 См. Также
• 4 Ссылки

Этимология

Оно происходит от протоиндоевропейского корень * man- (см. санскрит / авестийский ману-, славянское mǫž «мужчина, мужчина»). Славянские формы (русский муж «мужчина, мужчина» и т. Д.) Происходят от суффиксной основы * ман-гё-.

В индуистской мифологии, Ману — это имя традиционного прародителя человечества, который пережил потоп и дал человечеству законы. Гипотетически реконструированная протоиндоевропейская форма * Манус, возможно, также играл роль в протоиндоевропейской религии, основанной на этом, если есть какая-либо связь с фигурой Маннуса — сообщает римский историк Тацит ок. 70 г. н.э. — имя традиционного предка германских народов и сына Туисто ; современные источники, кроме Тацита, переосмыслили это как «первый мужчина».

В древнеанглийском языке слова wer и wīf (и wīfmann) использовались для обозначения «мужчины» и «женщины» соответственно, в то время как mann имело основное значение «взрослый мужчина-человек», но могло также использоваться для гендерно-нейтральных целей (как в случае с современным немецким мужчиной, соответствующее местоимению в английском высказывании «один делает то, что должен»).

Некоторые этимологии трактуют корень как самостоятельный, как и Словарь американского наследия. Из этимологий, которые действительно связаны с другими индоевропейскими корнями, человек «мыслитель» является наиболее традиционным, то есть слово связано с корнем * men- «думать» (родственный с разум). Эта этимология основана на том, что люди описывают себя как «мыслящих» (см. Саморефлексия человека ). Однако эта этимология не является общепринятой. Вторая потенциальная этимология связана с латинским manus («рука»), который имеет ту же форму, что и санскрит manus.

Другая спекулятивная этимология постулирует редукцию предка от «человека» к предку «человека». Человек происходит от * dhghem-, «земля», таким образом подразумевая, что * (dh) ghom-on- был бы «жителем земли». Последнее слово, сокращенное до последнего слога, будет просто * м-на-. Это точка зрения Эрика Партриджа, «Происхождение», под человеком. Такой вывод мог бы быть правдоподобным, если бы была известна только германская форма, но засвидетельствованное индоиранское ману практически исключает такую ​​возможность. Более того, * (dh) ghom-on-, как известно, сохранилось в древнеанглийском языке не как mann, а как guma, предок второго элемента современного английского слова «жених».

В конце двадцатого века, родовое значение слова «человек» уменьшилось (но оно также продолжается в соединениях «человечество», «обыватель», «никто» и т. д.). То же самое произошло и с латинским словом homo: в большинстве романских языков, homme, uomo, hombre, homem стали относиться в основном к мужчинам с остаточным родовым значением. Исключение составляет румынский, где om относится к «человеку», а не bărbat (мужчина).

Сгибаемые формы староанглийского mann:

Склоняемые формы древневерхненемецкого слова для человека (без i-мутации ):

Склоняемые формы древнескандинавского слова для man, maðr, являются:

Современное употребление

Слово «человек» до сих пор используется в общем значении в литературный английский.

Глагол to man (т.е. «снабдить [крепость или корабль] группой людей») восходит к раннему среднему английскому языку.

Слово обычно применяется как суффикс в современных сочетаниях, таких как «пожарный», «полицейский» и «почтальон». С социальными изменениями в конце 20-го века были придуманы новые гендерно-нейтральные термины, такие как «пожарный», «полицейский» и «почтальон», чтобы исправить гендерно-специфические коннотации названий профессий. Феминистки утверждали, что смешение человека с человеком и мужчиной с мужчиной было лингвистическим симптомом определения человечности, ориентированного на мужчин.

В американском сленге мужчина! также стал использоваться как выражение междометие, не обязательно обращающееся к слушателю, а просто добавленное для акцента, как мальчик!

Кроме того, в американском английском, выражение «The Man », относящееся к «деспотическим силам «, возникшая в южных штатах в 20 веке, и получила широкое распространение в городском преступном мире с 1950-х годов.

Использование man- в качестве префикса и в составе обычно обозначает общее значение «человек», как в человечестве, людоед, человек -made и т.д. В некоторых случаях при изменении гендерно-нейтральных существительных префикс может также обозначать мужской род, как в manservant (17 век). В контексте культурной войны с 2000-х по 2010-е годы мужчина был введен как уничижительный префикс в феминистском жаргоне, в некоторых случаях, в неологизмах, таких как mansplaining (2008 ) man spreading (2014 ) и т. Д.

См. Также

Искать Мужчина или man в Викисловарь, бесплатный словарь.

• Были
• названия человеческого вида
• Последний мужчина
• Гендерный нейтралитет в английском языке

Ссылки