»swofehuper« by richard tipping (+)
[via]
men fabricated the idea that they are the default sex to compensate for their biological inferiority and general superfluousness
this is not just the “natural order” this is the language of a patriarchal culture
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 ‘that/there’. He as a word evolved from the same ideas but Proto-Germanic words for ‘this/here’. Your idea of “patriarchal language” 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 “er” and “sie”, completely unrelated. So it is by clear happenstance, not some patriarchal conspiracy that the words “he” and “she” in English have similar form.
Woman: Oh god this one always gets my goat when people go for this one. Man did not used to mean “male”, man used to mean “humanity/human being”, the old words in Old English for male adult person and female adult person were “werman” and “wifman” respectively, we can see this relation in words like werewolf and wife as being the remnants of the base “wer-” and the base “wif-”. Woman evolved phonologically from the word “wifman” by natural processes where the ‘f’ sound dropped and the ‘i’ became lax. Man dropped its “wer” stem for reasons mostly unknown but I can guarantee have nothing to do with “patriarchy” 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 “masle” which meant masculine, while Female came from Old French as well “femella” 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 “ghomon” 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 “man” 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 “persona” from Latin which meant the same meaning, which ultimately derived from “phersu” Etruscan for ‘mask’ as Etruscans would often have theatre performers use masks to give identity to the performers. So never once did “person” have any meaning to do with “son”. So yes, this IS the “natural order” 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.
thank god for the explanation above
@langsandlit ho come un deja vù. Ma uno di quelli grossi.
@myworldoflanguages …. ti prego no… non di nuovo. amen al tipo che ha illuminato le masse tumbleriane
::cracks knuckles::
Okay, rhysiare, you wanna have a battle of linguistics? I’m ready. You mention having an undergraduate linguistics class under your belt and your blog identifies you as a grad student but you don’t say what in. I am also a grad student, with a BS and MA in linguistics and working towards a PhD in it. So now that our credentials are on the table…
1. While you’re right about almost all these word origins, the Proto-Indo-European roots of a word have little or nothing to do with the way a word is analyzed and interpreted synchronically (in the present day) by speakers. When I teach Ling 100 to undergrads, I see plenty of students who are native speakers spontaneously segment “per+son,” “wo+man,” “hu+man,” and “fe+male” exactly as the original image does. If you’re not familiar with the idea of morphological reanalysis, of course, I’m happy to explain it in more depth. If you are, then you should realize that appealing to the history of a word in a discussion about its present usage is fallacious at best, derailing at worst.
2a. But since we are talking about language history–where are you getting the form wermann from? It doesn’t occur in Bosworth-Toller, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, or the University of Toronto’s online corpus. Wer meaning specifically “man” is well-attested in OE, it’s cognate to the Latin root vir (as in “virile”) but all the way back to Old English, mann is attested as having the double meaning of “human being” and “male” human being. Words for “woman” on the other hand, include fǽmne (clearly a Latin loanword, always used with the sense of “damsel, unmarried woman”) and wif (-mann), which, as with modern German Frau, meant both “wife” and “woman”. You’ve also, incidentally, got the OE roots of “he” and “she” wrong–they both descend from the Proto-Germanic demonstrative *hiz/hijo/hit, whereas seo in OED was a definite article.
2b. And even if I were to credit that, somehow, wermann was a valid form–language isn’t a closed system evolving with no relation to the society that uses it. Sociolinguistics 101: language both reflects and constructs the social systems of those who use it. So ask yourself: why is it that mann came to mean both “humans in general” and “male human specifically” while wifmann remained a specifically marked “female human”? Why did the word wif come to mean strictly wife but (wer)mann didn’t comes to mean specifically husband? (Wer could be used as “man/husband” but was last attested in 1300s, according to the OED. “Husband” comes from hus-bonda, “the master of the house,” which has an attested feminine form hus-bonde “the mistress of the house”–where did that word go, and why?) Why are the default words for woman, like wif and fǽmne, defined in terms of a woman’s relationship or lack thereof to a man, but words for men and boys don’t require us to indicate their marital status?
3. Now, back to the synchronic point the art piece was trying to make, and which has been made by our fellow linguists since at least 1973, when Robin Tolmach Lakoff published Language and a Woman’s Place: when the words we actually use in our daily life present a gendered form as the default, it naturally colors our thinking about gender. The words in the graphic may not be the best examples, granted, but they serve a thematic point, which is that our culture too often treats “male” as as a default setting for humans and any other gender as an exception.
4. As for the comment added by @mitosisyourtosis, men have been saying the same or worse about women for a long-ass time. I don’t necessarily agree with the point but I’m gonna defend the fuck out of her right to say it.
I don’t know where you took your undergrad ling class or from whom, but in my classroom we don’t make fun of people for being non-experts in the field. We make fun of prescriptivists who gatekeep language within narrow, arbitrarily defined borders, because those borders almost always exist to reinforce the power of people who already have too much of it.
To the extent that we can know anything concrete about the pre-history and medieval history of language, both @rhysiare and @madmaudlingoes have got some things wrong here. Some notes:
What’s-his-face is right about “she” evolving from *seo, and maudlin is right that it meant “the” (at least at that stage it did; before it was a demonstrative. They were all demonstratives before. This is no secret, as pretty much all third person pronouns in all languages derive ultimately from demonstratives). That’s actually what happened: “she” derived from a word for “the” rather than the actual old third person singular feminine pronoun. The reason? The old separate third person masculine and feminine pronouns (*he and *heo/hio in the nominative) were evolving to sound the same, so people couldn’t tell the difference between the two. If you’re thinking to yourself “That’s great! Third person singular gender-neutral pronoun!”, I am too! And then what happened? Evidently it was too ambiguous for people, so they went and made a new feminine pronoun out of the old feminine “the”, *seo. Lame. Probably men feeling too insecure about themselves; wanted to be sure they could distinguish themselves. We could’ve avoided the necessity of using “they” in the singular if we’d just evolved one single third person singular animate pronoun, but nbd. “They” works fine. So, to recap: maud is slightly mixed up about the evolution of “he” and “she”, but rhy’s conclusion is either total speculation, or just plain wrong (or right for the wrong reason, but we’ll get to that in point 3 below).
Let’s just sidestep the whole “Did it mean human in general or masculine man in antiquity” argument and ask a different question: What if women were the linguistic default? It’s not “supposed” to happen if you follow Linguistic Universals, but the great thing about Linguistic Universals is they’re mostly bs. It’s mostly just linguists saying “Well, I haven’t seen x in a language, so I bet a language can NEVER have x!” Whatev. Even though it’s quite common for masculine to be the default, I know of one language where that isn’t the case: Moro. In Moro, you have words like (using IPA) [udʒi] “boy” and [ŋeɾa] “girl” with plurals [lǝdʒi] “boys” and [ɲeɾa] “girls”. As far as we saw, there isn’t a word that means “child” (gender-neutral), so what word is used for a mixed group of boys and girls? That’s right: [ɲeɾa]. Means “girls” or “children”. Same with the words for “man” and woman” vs. “people”. It’s basically the complete opposite of languages like Spanish and French. So! What’s the cultural result of it? Turns out the culture is still patriarchal. Conclusion: There’s a lot of misogyny in the history of humanity. Language didn’t cause it, and language can’t change it. Random stuff like this just happens, and people will fasten onto it because humans love coincidences and puns.
Most importantly, why did anyone bring up either diachrony or synchronic language use? This graphic has nothing to do with that and everything to do with orthography. You know what would totally undo this graphic? If we spelled the feminine words above as follows: shi, womon, femell, humon, persin. Seriously, of those, the ONLY one where the two word pieces are pronounced the same is “female~male”. The rest: [ʃiː] vs. [hiː]; [ˈwʊ.mǝn] vs. [ˈmæːn]; [ˈçu.mǝn] vs. [ˈmæːn]; [ˈpʰɚ.sɨn] vs. [ˈsʌːn]. If we’re talking about modern language use in the way academic linguistics talk about it, we’re talking about speech only, since most ignore the fuck out of orthography. I don’t even know why it came up, since the original graphic is basically the equivalent of “There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’” or “When you assume you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’” or Bart on The Simpsons pointing out that “adultery” has the word “adult” in it. It’s a clever visual or audio pun. It doesn’t need to make historical sense to make its point. At the same time, something like this doesn’t say anything important about language qua language: more about orthography and humans finding patterns in things. (Like why has no one talked about the animal in “carpet”—the little pet that apparently lives exclusively in your car?)
Also, when it comes to cultural misogyny as reified in language, these are not the examples to bring up! Please bring up examples from feminine pejoration, which is absolutely a real thing that happens in just about every language on the planet (I’m tempted to say every language, but will hedge for safety). This is the process whereby two words, one masculine and one feminine that are otherwise identical, end up taking on two different meanings. A very simple example will help to illustrate: master vs. mistress. Clearly related (the latter is the feminine version of the former); clearly can be male and female versions of the same thing, and yet in English “mistress” most commonly refers to a woman a man cheats on his spouse with. Can you use “master” to refer to a man a woman cheats on her spouse with? Nope. How about “wench” originally just meaning “girl” and coming to be an insult used exclusively with women? Or the animal terms hound/dog vs. bitch and what’s happened to them? And consider even milder things like prima donna. Why isn’t there an equivalent word deriving from male tenors? These things don’t happen by accident. This is the regular and crosslinguistic result of cultural misogyny. It’s real, it happens everywhere, and it can be undone. But don’t think that changing the language will change the culture. It doesn’t work that way. The language changes because the culture has changed. Language is a reflection of us. If we decide that we as a society want to be different, we will be, and our language will change with us.
Important takeaways here are:
Orthography ≠ language.
Cultural misogyny is widespread and real.
Language reflects culture, it doesn’t shape it.
Oh, and whenever I see this “misandry” noise crop up, let me just say…
I love linguistics so much. :)
