Re: man- (was: logic vocabulary)

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Cowan" <jcowan@...>


> Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
>> Eurocentric? What European languages, beyond English, are there that
>> derive
>> "woman" from "man"?
>
> Indeed, I think even English can be acquitted of that charge, at least
> diachronically: when the compound _wi:f-man_ > _woman_ was formed, _man_
> meant primarily 'person, homo, Mensch' (and only secondarily 'man, vir,
> Mann'), and _wi:f_ meant 'woman'.
Well exactly.  The word for masculine human in Old English, as you know, was
_wer_, cognate with L. vir.  Hence you have werhade and wifhade meaning
"male" and "female."  Eugenia, in Aelfric's Saint's Lives, who cross-dressed
in order to become a monk, was discovered at her death to be a wifhades man,
"a female person."  She was venerated anyway and granted sainthood.

To answer Andreas' query, I think what Remi meant to call to mind was the
long tradition in western thinking that woman is a deformation of a man; an
incomplete man, especially if we consider Galen's notion of female genitalia
as the reverse of a man's, somehow undeveloped, not dropped down, and thus
childlike and hidden. And women have been treated as children for millennia.
This is what so angered Mary Wollstonecraft at the end of the
eighteenth-century when she wrote her _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_,
much of it an invective against women who have been trained to be "gentle"
and "flirtatious," and to feign weakness and juvenility.  Also, efforts to
explain how "mankind" and "he" could be used as the generic phrases for
"humankind" in English have resorted to condescending expressions like "The
man embraces the woman, and thus they are one."

So then, linguistically speaking, "woman" doesn't really derive from "man."
You're right.  But conceptually and socially, the notion goes back to Eve
emerging from Adam's ribs.

Sally

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