Today I thought I would look at the origins of the words commonly used for the adult male and female of our species: man and woman. At times there has been objection from different camps to the use of “man” or the masculine for either gender when speaking generally, and while I agree with it in many ways, apologists for the predominance of the masculine could hearken back to the origins of the language to defend their practices, as “man” originally could refer to either humans in general, or in the sense that it is used today.
There were specific terms to refer to adult male and female human beings, those being wer(e), ‘man’ and wif, ‘woman’. Wer has cognates in the other Germanic languages, but also in the Latin word for an adult male, vir (the root of virile). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, both wer and wif had synonyms in wæpmann (weapon-man, the former particle being, apparently innuendo, and not condemnation of the masculine proclivity towards violence), and wifmann (wif+man, feminine), though by the end of the 13th century, both of the masculine-specific words were obsolete, leaving no word to distinguish the adult male, other than the second sense of “man”.
Wifmann, on the other hand, eventually became standardized as woman (after going through a number of –probably–regional variations including wifman, wummon, wymman, and wimmon) by the 16th century. The original word for “woman,” after struggling through a couple of rough patches (having to take work–second billing, no less–as a particle in the words fishwife, alewife, and housewife, eventually found its way to the meaning it currently holds, as a married woman. The OED describes the life of “wife” thusly:
A woman: formerly in general sense; in later use restricted to a woman of humble rank or ‘of low employment’ (J.), esp. one engaged in the sale of some commodity. Woman joined to a man by marriage; a married woman. Correlative of husband n. 2. (The ordinary current sense.)
So, another example of the someone–in this instance–a word pulling it (her?)self up by her bootstraps’ a triumph of the English language marketplace. Lingual prescriptionists would probably
have us still referring to women as “wifes”.
Interestingly enough, a similar process took place in Latin and some of its progeny. Homo/homines, the Latin word referring either to humankind or an adult male(s) (as was mentioned earlier, vir was the male-specific word), came to refer specifically to adult men (Italian uomo, French homme, Spanish hombre, etc.). The Latin for woman, mulier, came to be the word for wife in Italian, moglie, while in Spanish it has maintained its original meaning, muliebre = woman. Another Latin word for “woman”, femina, was adopted into Old French, and eventually became femme, meaning both woman and wife. In Italian this word became femmina, and is used for females in general. The word for “woman” in Italian is donna (<domna, domina), which is a cognate of dominate, and was originally a title of respect, if not nobility (not entirely clear to me). To complete the discursive discussion of Latin, the original Latin for “wife” was uxor, from which we get uxorious: “dotingly or submissively fond of a wife; devotedly attached to a wife” and uxorial: “of or pertaining to a wife or wives.”
So, I think that will be it for today, and it remains to be seen whether I will be adding entries over the weekend. I will be trying out different titles for the blog for a while. Let me know what you think. And please send in suggestions for words to discuss; the first was very interesting.
Good weekend to all.
Tags: Germanic, Latin, Man, Old English, Woman
