An objectification of proper spelling
This is an age old debate that I've been having on various boards for a while now. Every once in a while I run into some ardent feminist who claims that the word "woman" should be spelled "womyn"...
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Your ideas about the etymology of the word 'women' are correct. However, I think you are failing to recognize that your debating partners don't care.For starters, the debate isn't age-old. Most of...
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There is a correct answer here, though. Historical linguistics isn't really open to selective interpretation. Although you're probably right, I probably won't win. I was just wondering where the myth...
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If "Mann" simply meant "adult person, and "wiff" meant "female person," then why isn't/wasn't there another gender-specific prefix for "adult male person"? In the absence of such a prefix, I'd say...
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>I was just wondering where the myth came from in the first place. I think maybe the Bible (King James version) might have given them the idea.Gen 2:23 "And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones,...
View ArticleRe: An objectification of proper spelling
> There is a correct answer here, though.> Historical linguistics isn't really open to selective interpretation.You might find it an interesting exercise to ask your debating partners if they...
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That part of the bible was written in Hebrew, though, not Latin. Although, I suppose, these people wouldn't know that.I was kind of wondering why man didn't have a prefix. I'll see what I can find. I...
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I'm not suggesting that linguistics is a reason to go around changing spelling. I am suggesting, though, that if the word for "man" and the word for "human being" are the same, but there's a separate...
View ArticleRe: An objectification of proper spelling
The Old English (when wifman was coined, BTW) did hav a separate word for man in the modern sense. They said 'guma'. Tho, the fact that the word for 'human being' and 'man' can get confused doesn't...
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According to dictionary.com, apparently, there was a separate prefix in Old English, "wer" and that the original words were "waepman" (male, with the weird letter that connects the a and the e) and...
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Historical and archaeological evidence relating to for pre-Roman British societies is scanty, unevenly distributed and very difficult to interpret. Simply put, there's an amazing lack of fact beneath...
View ArticleRe: An objectification of proper spelling
"Wer" was not a prefix. It was a noun, sometimes compounded.In Old English, the predominant sense of "man" was an adult human, irrespective of sex. It was occasionally used to mean an adult male, but...
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Ahhh, that makes sense.I'm not sure there is a whole lot of empirical evidence about the people who lived in the British Isles before the Romans, but there sure is a lot of religious folklore...
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I really don't know much about the subject, but I suspect that New Age religions aren't accurate purveyors of facts about religious life in pre-Anglo Saxon Britain.
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As I was reading this, I thought of "werewolf". Sure enough, it is the "wer = man" meaning, therefore man-wolf. It can also be spelled "werwolf".
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Probably not. As far as I can tell, most of those are somewhat bastardized versions of early, unorganized, and hardly standardized beliefs loosely centered on variable folklore and the idea of a...
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Tracking back to Indo-European, and then up through Latin, this connects to vir, man, whence we get "virile" and "triumvirate".However, the identification of the first element of wer(e)wolf with OE...
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For rufio: a definitive approach to the subtopic of pre-Roman British religion - Anne Ross (1967). Pagan Celtic Britain, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. This may have been reprinted. Dated in some...
View ArticleRe: An objectification of proper spelling
The doubts in the OED center around the inclusion of the letter "e" after "wer." When examined in light of the development of similar words, it shouldn't be there.But since language development...
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