Hmm.

  • queermunist@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There’s a theory that, at one time, “man” was a gender neutral term for persons and we called males “weremen” and obviously women “women”

    That probably isn’t true, but it’s fun to think about a world where that was reversed.

    EDIT Also evidently there was wifmann and wapman, which is an even funnier world to imagine.

    • man_in_space@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      “Were” is cognate to Latin vir ‘man’—cf. “werewolf” (‘man-wolf’).

      “Woman” comes from a compound meaning “woman-person” (wif-mæn, cf. “wife”); a man was a wæpned-mæn (“weapon-person” or “penis-person”). The lexical narrowing of “man” to mean ‘male’ happened later, and it was indeed originally a gender-neutral term.

    • クーイフ@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      According to this, whether or not it is real:

      And we also see wæpman being specifically to refer to a man in relation to penetrative sex.

  • nosedive@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Not what you asked for, but Welsh has irregular plurals for adults and children, too:

    Adult: oedolyn
    Adults: oedolion

    Child: plentyn
    Children: plant

    (Still learning, so I’m not too sure why or how)

    • kwot@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Always knew Wales was essentially living in a different dimension… 🤔 (lol, thanks for the tidbit!)

      • man_in_space@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        The Welsh alphabet is beautiful. Nuts from a perspective of both Continental and British traditions, but I am extremely fond of it.

  • Erikatharsis@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    “Irwin, what is the plural of ox?”

    — “Oxen! The farmer used his oxen!”

    “Brian, what is the plural of box?”

    — “Boxen. I bought two boxen of donuts.”

    “Irwin, what is the plural of goose?”

    — “Geese! I saw a flock of geese!”

    “Brian, what is the plural of moose?”

    “MOOSEN!”

    • man_in_space@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      You make the joke, but people do use boxen as a jargonistic plural for box in computing circles (“Linux boxen”).

        • man_in_space@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Kind of had a delayed realization—your bit above also demonstrates the time depth and origins of English terms. “Goose” has an umlauted plural “geese” because it is a native word, descended from Common Germanic; “moose” is a borrowing from a Native American language (which one escapes me at the moment, sorry), so the umlaut—which is now much more highly marked in English, where the default plural is by far -s—was not applied to it.