From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Gender terms; was: Re: Historical roots of "womyn" spelling?
Date: 16 Nov 92 23:27:03 GMT
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU

In article <1992Nov13.213241.19962@gov.on.ca>, renzland@gov (Peter Renzland) writes:
>mcovingt@aisun3.ai.uga.edu (Michael Covington) writes:
>
>>renzland@gov.on.ca (Peter Renzland) writes:
>>>(Does English lead other languages in its abundance of gender-dominant
>>>terms?)
>
>>Hard to say.  English is almost unique among European languages in its
>>complete lack of grammatical gender.  That makes it easy to accuse English
>>of sexism.
>
>I had tried hard to focus my question so as to avoid a flurry of answers
>to questions I didn't ask.  I'm sorry that I wasn't clear enough.  I was
>not at all talking about grammatical gender.  I was talking about words
>such as woman.   Why is there not a word with the same *meaning* as woman
>that does not have man in it?   (Even I know that the "man" in "woman" is

Historical accident.  Why did the reflex of the word that appears as Baum in
German, boom in Dutch, disappear in English in favour of "tree"?  (English
"boom" was borrowed from Dutch shipbuilding terminology.)

>not incidental:-)  German has lots of grammatical gender and it has Frau.  
>Maaori doesn't have a trace of grammatical gender and it has (Wa)hine
>
>I suspect that some other words (manual, human, person) are
>(mis)taken to be gender-dominant by those who don't know their derivation.

Certainly.  How often have you seen reference to "herstory" = "history of women
and women's issues," because "history" is thought to be derived from "his
story"?

>I also suspect that this confusion is particularly easy in English, where
>most speakers know little etymology, where words are just labels, and
>word components are short and confusable.  I even suspect that the word
>female may have started out as a simple semantic unit and drifted (in the
>minds of some? speakers (and spellers)) to be derived from male.

The perceived connection between female and male is an old one.  Originally,
the Middle English femel, femelle showed its Middle French origins, derived
from Middle Latin femella, the Latin diminutive of femina "woman" = "one who
suckles" (PIE *dhe:- "suck").

"male," on the other hand, is from Middle French masle/male, from Latin
masculus, diminutive of mas "male."  The close semantic connection led to a
change in the word female which tied it more closely to that for male.

(Data from on-line Webster's.)

>Surely there are people here who have solid knowledge about these things,
>and who appreciate my question.  I'd very much like to hear from them, so
>that can replace my vague speculations with sound understanding.  Thanks :-)

I think "appreciate" is too strong a word :-) but I'm glad to show off a bit...
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_
Newsgroups: sci.lang