»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.
*deep breath* Ok. So. The origins of these words are certainly worth knowing HOWEVER the idea that linguistic evolution happens in some sort of vacuum outside society and culture is utterly bizarre. Obviously the language is influenced by patriarchy because language is culture. Furthermore, the idea of singular origins for the current forms of words is simply inaccurate. Much of this interpretation of the history of language is just that: interpretation. The etymologies of these terms are complicated and intertwined. You'll find linguists attribute the term "man" to a number of root languages and terms (Hebrew: Adam; Greek: Anthropos; etc.) that always had the meaning of both male individual and all humans, even when you had other specific prefixes or terms for man and woman (like wer and wif/wo). The societal perception of s/he, wo/man, fe/male is also *how those things came to be codified in current form,* regardless of their origins. If you've got words referring to opposites evolving from different forms to be more similar, that's not a coincidence, that is language becoming more efficient and easy to understand. This is why any women's studies 101 student can see that the words seem obviously connected. They are, they evolved together. On top of which, the claim of specialized knowledge in linguistics is a bit of a smokescreen. Language is something where the perception of the speakers is the thing itself. Scholastic understanding of the etymological *origin* of terms has very little to do with how language is used *currently* to reflect power dynamics in society. It is not irrelevant that one can drop wer and not wo. It is not irrelevant that the simpler form without a faux prefix always means male and/or everyone. The idea that someone is a linguist and believes all linguistic change is "coincidence" and also believes anyone claiming there are cultural reasons behind those changes is buying into "conspiracies" is laughable. That someone can use the neologism “misandrist” in a post claiming linguistic change has not been driven by sexism would be more laughable if people didn't buy it.
That said, I totally don’t get where the person/son thing is coming from.