Omg no, you are wrong on so many levels and as a linguist this makes me ache something terrible. In my linguistics class in undergrad, we actually made fun of people who think like you along these lines and for good reason, because you are wholly ignorant and are choosing to spin narratives about things and fields which you know completely nothing about yet pretend you do.
She: This word evolved naturally from Old English from seo/heo which were just words to refer to feminine-female people evolving from Proto-Germanic words meaning âthat/thereâ. He as a word evolved from the same ideas but Proto-Germanic words for âthis/hereâ. Your idea of âpatriarchal languageâ further falls apart when you compare this part of English to other Germanic languages, of which English is related, the words in German for he and she are âerâ and âsieâ, completely unrelated. So it is by clear happenstance, not some patriarchal conspiracy that the words âheâ and âsheâ in English have similar form.Â
Woman: Oh god this one always gets my goat when people go for this one. Man did not used to mean âmaleâ, man used to mean âhumanity/human beingâ, the old words in Old English for male adult person and female adult person were âwermanâ and âwifmanâ respectively, we can see this relation in words like werewolf and wife as being the remnants of the base âwer-â and the base âwif-â. Woman evolved phonologically from the word âwifmanâ by natural processes where the âfâ sound dropped and the âiâ became lax. Man dropped its âwerâ stem for reasons mostly unknown but I can guarantee have nothing to do with âpatriarchyâ because phonological change has no basis in that.
Female: Male and Female actually come etymologically from two completely different words. Male comes from Old French âmasleâ which meant masculine, while Female came from Old French as well âfemellaâ which meant young woman. This is another case, just like he and she, where the words coincidentally ended up looking similar without having any direct correlation in historical linguistic processes to make them as such.
Human: This word etymologically derives from Proto-Indo-European âghomonâ which means earthly being as opposed to heavenly being which would refer to gods. You have some small glimmer of hope here in that the word does eventually branch off into the word for âmanâ in some languages but this is still too small of a precedent to base any conspiratorial thinking like you are doing off of.
Person: This one offends me the most, simply because I love the fuck out of Etruscan language and your continued ignorance just irks me at this point. Person derives from âpersonaâ from Latin which meant the same meaning, which ultimately derived from âphersuâ Etruscan for âmaskâ as Etruscans would often have theatre performers use masks to give identity to the performers. So never once did âpersonâ have any meaning to do with âsonâ. So yes, this IS the ânatural orderâ or language.
Please never proselytise your faulty ideology and misandrist thinking within speaking about word origins and morphology again, as unless you actually do fact checking, I will school the everloving hell out of you, stay in your lane.
