Jump to navigation Jump to search This article is about the word “man”. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of runes. In Hindu mythology, Manu is the name of the traditional progenitor of humankind who survives a deluge and gives mankind laws. Some etymologies treat the russian word for wife as an independent one, as does the American Heritage Dictionary.

This etymology, however, is not generally accepted. Another speculative etymology postulates the reduction of the ancestor of “human” to the ancestor of “man”. This is the view of Eric Partridge, Origins, under man. Such a derivation might be credible if only the Germanic form was known, but the attested Indo-Iranian manu virtually excludes the possibility.

Old English not as mann but as guma, the ancestor of the second element of the Modern English word bridegroom. This article needs additional citations for verification. The word “man” is still used in its generic meaning in literary English. The word has been applied generally as a suffix in modern combinations like “fireman”, “policeman” and “mailman”.

With social changes in the later 20th century, new gender-neutral terms were coined, such as “firefighter”, “police officer” and “mail carrier”, to redress the gender-specific connotations of occupational names. Feminists argued that the confusion of man as human and man as male were linguistic symptoms of male-centric definitions of humanity. Also, in American English, the expression “The Man”, referring to “the oppressive powers that be”, originated in the Southern United States in the 20th century, and became widespread in the urban underworld from the 1950s. Use of man- as a prefix and in composition usually denotes the generic meaning of “human”, as in mankind, man-eating, man-made, etc. Look up Man or man in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

American Heritage Dictionary, Appendix I: Indo-European Roots. 1 Archived 2006-05-19 at the Wayback Machine. Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, p. George Hempl, “Etymologies”, The American Journal of Philology, Vol. Robinson, A Guide to Old English, 6th ed p. Karl August Hahn, Althochdeutsche Grammatik, p. Sexuality and danger in the field: starting an uncomfortable Conversation.