The slang application, that is. I know in current times it’s American, the British (and Aussie) counterpart being “mate”. But was there ever a time (now??) in which “man” was used in British slang?
It’s been used (for either gender) in the North East of England for many years. You’ll have to wait for a Geordie to explain where they got it from and how long they’ve been using it.
It’s a Germanic thing. In German, man means a person of either sex. Mann means specifically an adult male person.
In English, we’ve lost the distinction between these two closely related Germanic words, and so nonsexist language has had to reinvent the words and expressions that once used “man” to refer to humans in general, because that sense has been obscured by the specifically male sense.
Etymologically, woman comes from Old English wif-man: the word wif (>wife) by itself simply meant ‘woman’ or ‘female’ (although now its use has become restricted to mean a woman married to someone, except in the phrase “old wives’ tale”; in German the cognate Weib still means ‘woman’), and OE man meant, as in German, a person of either sex. So originally wif-man meant literally ‘a female human being’.
Compare the Malay word orang which means ‘a person’; in Malay the word for woman is orang perempuan ‘female person’, while the word for man is orang lelaki ‘male person’. People looking up the etymology of “orangutan” are told it means ‘man of the forest’. Not exactly. It means person of the forest. Those old etymologies were using “man” in the old Germanic sense of ‘person of either sex’, but now it’s likely to be misunderstood as “adult male person.”
Jomo Mojo, the question was about the particular use of ‘man’ in slang phrases, for examplein David Bowie’s Sufragette City:
Where you can see that man is being used in the seond rather than third person. Unless you are sayig that this practice is comes from the Germanic roots.
As Everton says this vernacular use of the word ‘man’ is very common in the North-East of England.
*Unless you are saying this practice comes from the Germanic roots of English.
I thought Mensch was a human male (Mann) or female (Frau). But my Deutsch is very old and rusty.
English has: human, man, and woman.
Latin: homo, vir, femina.
Greek: athropo, andro, and gyne.
While these languages may have implied ‘men and/or woman’ by the usage of the male term, any argument about these languages actually lacking a generic ‘man or woman’ word is false. And so, there is no need to make up a generic word for ‘a human’ in Engilsh or any of these languages.
(Although, the singular generic first person pronoun meaning “either a male or female” is problematic.)
Peace, man.
Mensch means “person” in German. Man is the third person gender neutral term, as in “man kann”, i.e. “one can”.
In Greek, the first two words are anthropos and aner. (The nominative case is aner; other declensions use the stem andr-, so you get partial credit.)
As for English, first of all the word human is not native to English; it’s an import from Latin, and second, it’s an adjective, not a noun, so it isn’t quite analogous with man and woman. The original Old English word was man which meant ‘a human being’, while the word for an adult male person was guma (survives today only in “bridegroom”).
Exactly. It’s gender-neutral.
In Greek, the first two words are anthropos and aner. (The nominative case is aner; other declensions use the stem andr-, so you get partial credit.)
In Latin, I guess you could use femina to mean ‘woman’ (its original etymological derivation means ‘she who breastfeeds’), but the usual Latin word for woman is mulier.
As for English, first of all the word human is not native to English; it’s an import from Latin, and second, it’s an adjective, not a noun, so it isn’t quite analogous with man and woman. The original Old English word was man which meant ‘a human being’, while the word for an adult male person was guma (survives today only in “bridegroom”).
Exactly. It’s gender-neutral.
It is absurd to say that ‘human’ is not native to English simply becuase it has a Latinate rather than Germanic root. A good chunk of English is Latinate. While English has Germanic roots, it is not simply a branch of German. Since I don’t have an OED, I don’t know when ‘human’ entered English, but I’m willing to bet it was a long time ago.
Au contraire…
Peace.
I was using the definition of “native” as understood in historical linguistics. From the original stock and not borrowed.
The OED’s first cite for human as an adjective is from 1398; the first as a noun is from 1533. Jomo Mojo point that it does not trace back to Old English is valid.
As for the OP, the OED lists man in this sense as being used in north England (as everton points out) as well as Irish, Scottish, and South African English. Besides, doesn’t Austin Powers use it? So it must be British.
As I learned recently on a repeat of Ken Burn’s Jazz, hip black guys started calling each other “man” at some point (40’s? 50’s?) in response to the tendancy of being addressed as “boy”.
Of course, Britain became"swinging" in the 60’s as a result of the influx of black-influenced music and culture.
Partridge’s dictionary of slang records it in Britain in the early 20th century and notes widespread African use. It was popularized in the U.S. in the 1950s as beatnik slang. The beatniks are reported to have picked it up from black bluesmen, but Partridge does not indicate where they picked it up.
JeffB was obviously joking about the Austin Powers reference, but even apart from tomndebb’s citation I’m certain the use of man in the north east of England has nothing to do with “Swinging London” and predates it. The same cannot necessarily be said for the rest of the country.
Perhaps it’s worth adding that the pronunciation of the word brought in during the ‘60s has an emphatic vowel, but in the Gerordies’ own use it has a weak vowel – almost just a mumbled “mn”.
What about “mon” in Scotland? A term of address, old enough not to have been derived from imported Ebonic speech, but native to Scotland itself. “Whit’re ye daeing, mon?”
Well anyway, the point I made about “man” being used for either gender is validated by the Germanic philological examples from Old English and German. The mention of it being used for either gender wasn’t exactly in the OP, but it was close. It may strike our ears as odd to hear a woman being addressed as “man.” But the word actually was common gender once. Maybe this is a survival of that usage.
“Smokin’ my ganga, mon.”
Right you are, Derleth. The sound of the language spoken in Jamaica does have a trace of Scottish lilt mixed in with the Africanisms. This completes the “man” circle that began with an Ebonic expression’s links to Northern English speech.
Geordie on board! everton is quite correct, “man” has been used as a form of address here for centuries, as it has in Scotland (Lowland Scots and Northumbrian dialects have several things in common). Jomo Mojo may also be interested to know that we will also refer a woman as a “wife” (or “wifey”), a usage I’m not sure survives elsewhere.
I believe that “man” as a form of address was once standard in British English, but died out in most of the country, only to be re-imported in the 60s from American slang. As evidence, I provide this quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
As an experiment, try imagining that speech being spoken by a Geordie