Good point. So let’s look at tea, as long as I’m hung up on the subject. Tea is very important in many cultures; certainly in the US. And yet, there are nowhere near as many words for tea as there are for coffee (or beer). While coffee has hundreds of slang terms, tea doesn’t. Tea is just modified by adjectives, rather than new terms for it. We have green tea, black tea, hot tea, iced tea, scented tea, fruit flavored tea, decaf tea - all still just the word tea with adjectives attached. Even when we talk about various breeds or varieties of tea, with names, we still think of them as “something-tea” not just “something.” And yet, this country drinks as much tea - more, in some parts - as it does coffee, java, joe, latte, espresso, etc., etc.
I say it says something important about tea, that it is so unchangeable a word or concept even when new products are introduced (e.g. the recent spate of assorted green teas), whereas coffee gets all kinds of new names. I’m not sure WHAT it says, but I am sure it’s something important. I’m just looking for some whay to find out what it is.
Before leaping to the conclusion that tea in itself is important, you should address whether or not the mode of introduction of “new” forms of tea differed from that of coffee. It may also be that modes of consumption and/or production differ in ways socially significant.
I also meant to say that at least here in the U.S., if you ask for a cuppa, your more likely to get coffee than tea.
BunRab, don’t forget “herbal tea”.
Perhaps what it says is that language often fails to follow any set patterns while adapting. Coffee grows dozens of terms for the same thing, and more terms for the variations in how it is prepared, while a whole bunch of unrelated products are referred to as tea because they are leaves that are brewed. Similarly, we park in a driveway and drive on a parkway. :ducks quickly:
Despite the classic example of Eskimo snow, the S-W hypothesis has to do with a great deal more than mere vocabulary. If this were not so, Loglan would not have been invented as a testing tool, since any young artificial language will tend to have a skewed vocabulary.
There are far more interesting points to S-W. In English, it is impossible to make a claim without a time aspect, and frequently difficult to make general statements without irrelevant sexual data. In Apache, it is impossible to make a claim without an epistemological aspect. Some languages have only what English would call “the passive voice”.
In one Amerind language, “The man lies sick” has to be translated into something that translates back to English along the lines of “This man, I know, lies on his side, ill, in the distant, but within view, house.” In another, “I eat,” becomes, “With respect to this one, there is an occasion of eating.” From their viewpoint, equally simple statements translated into English carry similar burdens.
Some languages lack a word for “thing”. English, almost uniquely, lacks a word for “male human being” – the word for “human begin” had to be pressed into service. The Tobriand Islanders view everything in terms of manifestations of Platonic ideals. And all natural languages (and artificial languages of the Esperanto type) are, when examined closely, slovenly beyond belief about logic words like “and” and “not”. (The double-negative rule of English is a rare exceptional.)
Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, just how important is tea to our culture? It may be a popular beverage, but does it have the importance in our culture that, say coffee does? I ask this partly because I am taking fifteen minutes of personal time at work, which I do every day at about this time, which has been designated by our corporate culture as a time to drink coffee (it’s rarley enforced). Tea just doesn’t have that effect on American culture. There may be a history to it, too. George O. Trvelyan relates the story in **The American Revolution **of two British spies in Connecticut who discovered that the best way to kill every conversation in an American teahouse was to order tea.
Tea is a much quieter obsession than coffee. We don’t discuss it, or overtly use it as a reason to socialize, or have much in the way of teahouses (except a bunch of hippie restaurants and lesbian vegetarian restaurants, both of which tend to have tea de jour and umpteen herbal teas on the menu) (yeah, I eat out at a LOT of different places). But nonetheless, an awful lot of it gets drunk. In the Northeast quadrant of the US, hot tea first thing in the morning, even in August. In Texas, iced tea with every meal, even in January.
Eat out at any restaurant in the South, and more people will be ordering iced tea with their meal than all the fancy wines put together. Scholz’s beer garden served pitchers of iced tea as often as beer, for all the people who had to wake up without a headache the next morning. (An Austin legend.) Roaming cafeteria carts dispensing free tea refills. And iced tea year-round has been spreading, following, as best I can tell, the spread of Southwest Airlines. When Southwest started flying into Chicago Midway, Chicago Midway started serving iced tea year round at the concession stands, and it spread to the rest of Chicago within a couple years, where before that, iced tea was powdered Liptons in July and August only. All the Texas pilots and flight attendants weren’t going to like going anyplace that didn’t have tea waiting for them!
When an adult is sick and needs hot beverages, we automatically offer tea (including herbals), not coffee. Got a sore throat? Tea with honey and lemon, even though any hot beverage with sugar would have the same effect.
Although people in the US have been drinking coffee a long time, too, it’s only in the past few years that the current kind of coffeehouses became a fad and people started using their free time ordering exotic coffees. Before that - my age is showing - a coffeehouse was a music club that didn’t serve alcohol, and consequently usually had free poetry and people playing guitar and folk music for tips. (Hell, I sang in a coffeehouse a few times in the Boston area. If they’d let me sing, they’d let anybody. Oh, and they served tea as well as coffee.)
Doesn’t your dictionary have another definition for man, though? Maybe ** Any human being regardless of sex or age; a member of the human race **? (American Heritage) So we don’t have a seperate word for each concept.
I think if John W Kennedy were here John W Kennedy would say that we don’t have a way to make a reference to someone not present, without using that person’s name. A good illustration of this would be computer bulletin boards, where posters have no way of knowing the gender of other posters. They compensate by using the second person, or by referring to other posts obliquely, as a way to avoid repeating someone’s name. I won’t say any more on John W Kennedy’s behalf because John W Kennedy seems perfectly capable of speaking for John W Kennedy’s self.
The original post said there was no single word for a male human being in English. There is. Simply because the word has more than one use does not invalidate any particular usage.
I should have pointed out that there are many single words for male human being in English. Including …
Most of these have only a single meaning of male human being, or the primary meaning is that.
To forestall arguments, “man” and “boy” can be, and have been, used to refer to male human beings of all ages e.g. “I’ll send a boy around to collect the money at 5’oclock” or the name of the band “Back Street Boys”
The real problem with the original statement is that most of the present audience have been exposed only to a dramatically reduced version of English, with most of the rich variations removed completely or melded into some simple easily digestable form, losing most of the original meaning.
“Man” is the word for “human being”. It has also been drafted to mean “male human being”. Most languages have two words. (So did English, once: “wer” – cognate with Latin “vir” – survives vestigially in “werewolf” and “wergild”.)
Lots of disagreement. Man is the word for male human being; females have only relatively recently been considered full human beings, and therefore only recently been added to the group referred to as “man.” And many resent it, too. You won’t find many women who agree that they could just as easily be called men as be called human beings. Man is the word for a male; human being, or human, or even person, is the word(phrase) for a human of either gender.
Tangentially, Chinese doesn’t bother with gendered pronouns; they don’t refer to “he” or “she.” My Taiwanese-born co-workers still have trouble with that in English, even after 20 years here- they use he or she, whichever comes to tongue first, to refer to whoever. They really have to stop and think, if they want to get it right by our standards. (Just as in English, we have no gendered articles- we have only “the” and in learning many Romance or Teutonic foreign languages, we have some trouble memorizing those genders of every damn noun, and wondering why the heck it matters.)
Regarding the “man” debate, “man” is a word that has been used to both mean “the male human” and “any human, regardless of gender”. (Example of usage: “Man is the thinking animal.”) The question being, which usage came first, and why.
John W. Kennedy is stating that the broad usage came first, and there is an obsolete word that originally was used in the narrow gendered case.
Following that plan, it is surmisable that the usage went as such because so often speakers in English related the broad case with implying only the males being the important human beings.
The other possible explanation is that “man” originally meant male, and was just coopted to mean “human” out of the male egotism above. Same factors, but different sequence of events.
With the recent cultural changes to accept equality of women, we find that usage unsatisfactory. Thus we try to separate the usage again. However, longstanding usage has made certain phrases and concepts (or at least quotations) hard to adjust.
jezzaOZ said:
If you look at your list, most of those are informal or slang terms. Most also convey some additional trait of information beyond just an adult male human - some affection or identity. And contrary to your claim, “boy” most properly is an immature male human, not an adult male human. It has sometimes been used to denigrate certain people, such as referring to any and all black men, regardless of age, as boy (or [southern drawl] “bo-ay” [/drawl]). “Sending the boy around” usually meant just that, either sending a non-adult male or sending a black male. The Back Street Boys use that term for its illiterative properties, as well as to emphasize/imply their youth. It’s a marketing ploy.
As for “rich variations”, some people refer to that as slang or as corruption of the language.
Other words for the human species include “mankind”, “human”, “human being”, and “humanity”. Note the first one and its relationship to the word “man” refering to all of humanity.
Um, no. You are wrong, “woman” is not exactly as inclusive as “man”. “Man” has been used to refer to mankind in general as well as males in specific. “Woman” is strictly gendered.
I have no judgement on whether John W. minds being refered to as a woman.
Woman is from the Old English wifman - female human. The equivilant word for a male was woepman. Wyf and wer were also used, without the ‘man’.
Eventually usage drifted so that woepman and wer ceased to be used, and man stepped in to fill the resulting vacancy(Luckily human and person were around to take it’s place!).
According to Tacitus, the term man is used in the name of German tribes such as the Allemannii to refer to the original founder of the tribes: Mannus. This usage is one of three stems to the word. It appears quite likely that the first man was Mannus - a male - and his decendants became Mannii - people of Mannus. This has also transferred over to the Sanscrit manu - humankind.
Male is a term that dervives from Latin masculus from mas meaning a male person. It sounds like the best term so far for the ill defined concept Male Human Being
Human hasn’t got anything to do with the Germanic Man. Human is a Latin derivation from humanus, related to homo
Finally, some have dismissed some of my suggestions for a word for male human being because they are slang or because they are not unique.
The problem of uniqueness is simple. The term dog has many meanings. If you follow the argument, then we don’t have a name for dog, because any name we use is also used for something else. In this, as in most cases, context is everything. This also resolves the problem of using a term such as Male or Man to mean a male human being. The context determines the meaning.
The problem of slang is harder - or easier- Language is evolving. Most of the words we use are slang or derived from it. Slang today is the first tryout of the revered phrase of tomorrow. If you listen to the Queen of England speaking, just about every third word is slang derived, usually in the last 150 years. Again, being slang doesn’t undermine its meaning.
When it comes down to it, the simplest test is the toilet door. If the words works on the toilet door to separate male and female human beans then it is good enough for me.
Absolutely!! Good test!! And if JWK - or anyone else - thinks it’s just as easy for a woman to go into a room marked Men, because Man is inclusive, he (or she or it- perhaps I shouldn’t assume John is a man?) obviously hasn’t been paying attention. Women get arrested for going into mens’ rooms when there’s a long line at the women’s room and none at the men’s room.
You know what? I don’t give a damn how pissed off you are about your personal life. It doesn’t give you the right to falsify facts. (If Dorothy L. Sayers were alive to see the modern intellectual disintegration of feminism, she’d probably take cyanide.)
And the plain fact, known to everyone who takes the time to learn the facts, is that the word “Man” refers to the entire human race, and is only secondarily extended, faute de mieux, to mean the male only. It is a very regretable state of affairs (witness this idiotic exchange), but it’s a true one.
What, John? You’re saying that it’s NOT a fact that you’d be annoyed if women started using the men’s rooms any time they wanted, because you contend that man is inclusive first and male only secondarily?
Now myself, I grew up with co-ed bathrooms; that is to say, like any normal household, we did not have separate bathrooms in our house for the males and the females. So I personally wouldn’t care.
And whose personal life were you referring to? I don’t see anyone here who has spent any time talking about their personal lives. There are people who have dug up some serious dictionary and derivation issues; do you think that their use of a dictionary that has a different list from yours is a reflection of their personal lives, or constitutes “falsifying facts”? If that’s what you think, then I’d say it’s you who has the problem with word definitions.
In short, John, don’t mention other people’s personal lives as you imagine them to be - it’s got nothing to do with the issue.
Strictly contributing another viewpoint on the “man as inclusive/man as male only” thing:
There are a couple of rail bridges on the line I ride to work that have signs posted on the outside beams: “WILL NOT CLEAR MAN”. I really don’t think that the railway means that it’s unsafe for a male human to stand at that point when a train is passing but safe for a female human in the same spot.
