Re: CHAT: Epicene man (was Re: ...y'know)

At 06:46 +0100 1.7.1999, Raymond A. Brown wrote:

[Hope you don't mind my snipping all this, man! ;)]

>But that is exactly the usage I've heard frequently in the last two or
>three years - it is used as a generic vocative among many of my students.
>"Hey, man, come over here" may certainly be addressed to a female, young or
>old (no agism here), and may be uttered by male or female.
>
>Ray.
But isn't this caused by the polysemy of English _man_ -- "male human
being" AND "human being in general"?  In Swedish we can use _m"anniska_
"human being" as a kind of 'expletive vocative', when we think that the
actions/looks/conditions of the person addressed are somehow outrageous, or
even when we are just going to tell about something outrageous.  In the
first case _m"anniska_ comes at the end of the statement, in the second it
precedes the statement.

(BTW his use of _m"anniska_ also has a special pronunciation ['mEnxa]
against unmarked ['mEnnixa], though this holds good only in the standard
language, most dialects having the shorter form as the only, unmarked
pronunciation.)

I've also noted that in modern Icelandic there is a drive towards using
_maDur_ ['ma:DYr] only in the sense "human being", and only _karl_ [katl]
for the sense "male person" (--one can even say _karlmaDur_ "male _maDur_"
and _kvenmaDur_ "female _maDur_" if one wishes to be more specific!)  When
I was on Iceland in 88-89 I didn't notice any tendency to use _maDur_ as a
word of address to non-male people; one normaly said _kaeri/kaera_
[khjaIrI]/[khjaIra] even to total strangers.  _MaDur_ is an address for
talking down to people, it seems, though this wasn't the case in the old
language.

Ray, I wonder if it isn't the case that a lot of your students (whom I have
understood from earlier statements of yours to be a multiculty crowd :) are
bilingual in languages that habitually make the "male"/"human being"
distinction which is absent in English?

/BP

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  B.Philip Jonsson  <bpj@...> <melroch@...>

        Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                            (Tacitus)