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guest_
· 2 years ago
· FIRST
The debate of language and gender gets silly at times. Language doesn’t create reality it is used to describe reality. The relation of words doesn’t tell us about reality but about the mindset of those who shaped the flow of language. Many of those gender term debates only apply in English or some closely related languages for example. In old English, mann (man) was gender neutral- we still use the word that way today such as “mankind.” Males were called werman and females wifman. Werwulf is literally wer=male wulf= wolf: man wolf. Over time wifman became “woman” and “werman” became “man,” likely a reflection of gender bias as “male” became synonymous to “person” and female stayed as a variant of person. In reality we know that in the technical sense, all humans start out as “female” as embryos….
guest_
· 2 years ago
So if language reflected reality, the word for all humans “man” would be what we called females and males would be a variant denotes by prefix or suffix. Most (but not all) of the time when you encounter a word that seems gendered in such a way, it is either a throw back to a gender neutral root or some sort of loan from gendered languages where most or many nouns have gender, or it’s a coincidence and doesn’t come to us through the same root. More modern words that aren’t linked to older variants may come to us through a modern gendered meaning or understanding, but older words or is generally just a coincidence and not much to read into beyond the known fact that through history men have tended to dominate English speaking societies to the exclusion or marginalization of women.
