Here’s my chance, once again, to step in as peacemaker and spread light and cheer in this forum. So, in my best appeasing manner, I ask all and sundry to remain cool, calm and collected, otherwise we’re going to see someone get a royal ass-kicking! :mad:
moderator, «Comments on Cecil’s Columns»
Imagine you are walking in the park with a friend. Suddenly, your friend tugs on your shirt sleeve and says, “Look at that man over there!” You look in the direction your friend is pointing, but the only person you see is a boy of about 10.
“What, him?” you ask, pointing at the boy.
“Yes, that man right there,” your friend affirms.
Wouldn’t it strike you as odd that your friend chose the word “man” to refer to a 10-year-old boy?
I posit this scenario to demonstrate that the word “man” in English contains a number of features. Well, at least three: human, male, and adult. Any referent that does not meet at least these three characteristics cannot be called a “man”, barring special considerations. (By which I mean specialized, highly contextual scenarios where the typical usage of a word can be stretched. Imagine a father telling his son at his Bar Mitzvah, “Today, you are a man.” Is his son a man? In a specialized, cultural-context-dependent sense, yes. But would strangers walking down the street describe him as a man? Very doubtful.)
Imagine you’re again walking with your friend, who points to a woman and says, “Look at that man over there!” Again, there is a very jarring dissonance between the features of the word “man” and the features of the referent.
JWK is right in insisting “man” is historically gender-neutral, but meanings can shift over time.
So IMHO “man” is out as a term to generically describe all male humans, as in its common use it excludes non-adult male humans.
The word “male,” by contrast, carries no feature describing the age of the referent. However, it also carries no feature to describe the species of the referent–though if no species is mentioned, “human” does seem to be the default. For example:
“I saw four males.”
With no other context, most readers would assume these to be human males. However, in
“We went on this whale-watching expedition, and I saw four males!”
we’d assume the speaker meant four male whales. The feature [+ human] is not integral to the meaning of “male”.
As for English being “almost unique” in having no word for “male human being,” I think that’s a gap common to many Indo-European languages. Russian has “muzhchina” (‘man’), “mal’chik” (‘boy’) and “chelovek” (‘person’), but no word that encompasses all (and only) male humans. As far as I know. Native Russian speakers are welcome to correct me if I’m wrong here. Similarly, I think it would be weird in German to call a 10-year-old boy a “Mann” instead of a “Junge”, and it would certainly be odd to call a little French boy “un homme” instead of “un garçon.”
Oh, and I just want to add that I think it’s great that in many Romance languages, the word for “person” is gramatically feminine. I think of it as revenge against people who bull-headedly insist that inherently male words are in fact gender-neutral.
Okay, that last post was supposed to have the devastatingly clever title, “It’s raining ‘man’!” but somehow the last part got lopped off. Damn.
If I were an English public schoolboy I wouldn’t be in the least surprised. Your example is perfectly acceptable dialect for male upperclass British boys.
Don’t forget you speak one dialect of English compared to the thousands in existence. There is very little you can generalise in terms of usage. Let alone be dogmatic about it.
Discussing dialect of British schoolboys neatly brings in the subject of Children’s language.
When I was a child I lived for a time on the East coast of Scotland and spoke a language that only other children up and down the cost spoke. Adults did not speak this language. It had a lot of words, phrases and grammar that, I think, were Old-Norse. As we grew from child to grownup we outgrew this language and spoke as others spoke. For me the language is forgotten and I live far away, but I often wonder if this is the only children’s language in the world, or even if it still exists.
Very, very, very good point. When I made the generalization about the meaning of “man” in English, I was being rather culturally imperialistic and thinking only of Standard American English (SAE).
“Children’s language” is a common phenomenon around the globe, but not to the extent you’ve described. Children in the SAE dialect area, for example, use several words that adult speakers tend not to: mommy, doggy, pee-pee, etc. (I say “tend not to” because it’s easy to think of exceptions. Adults might use such words when talking to small children, or in the context of a joke.) Children’s words are often formed through suffixation of phonologically simple words, or through reduplication (“doo-doo”). Most of the words that come to mind for SAE children’s language are disyllabic and of the form consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV)–not orthographically, of course, but phonetically.
The children’s language of Scotland sounds fascinating, jezzaOZ. How old were you when you outgrew it? Do adults use the language when addressing children, or in any other context?
MisterBK, there is an amusing “feature” of the vBulletin software: when you include a quotation mark in the subject of a post, it (and the text following it) will magically disappear if you preview the post.
It sounds like to me you are talking about a different kind of “children’s language”. Your version seems to be the words that little children use and are taught when they can’t clearly say the proper ones, or adults don’t want them to use the proper ones. Your examples - mamma, poppa, doo-doo - all fit that mold. This “children’s language” is understood easily by adults, and is often taught by them.
I think jezzaOZ is referring to something different. He/she seems to be talking about a language that the children themselves speak to each other, but that adults don’t understand. I think in America the closest might be the absorbtion of some Japanese words that children are picking up from the entertainment that the adults aren’t following. I read something to that effect some time ago.
Regarding your examples of “man” referring to non-adult male humans, they are not conclusive. You are correct that generally the word “man” is taken to mean adult male humans to the exclusion of others. Especially with the linguistic shift because of feminism. But what about the usage of “-man” at the end of words, such as “mailman”, “postman”, etc, that we are being driven to replace by such cumbersome terms as “mailperson” or “mail carrier” and “postal worker”? That is a clear example of the word “man” as a carryover from the days when “man” was a generic for human as well as a gendered version.
Or to take an example that raises a lot of side issues that are dealt with elsewhere, let’s consider Neal Armstrong’s famous words from the moon:
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
There is a bit of controversy over that sentence and the now frequent insertion of a parenthetical “a” into the sentence just before “man”. Why is that necessary? Because as written above, Neal is in effect saying “That’s one small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.” The sentence makes much less sense that way. That is another clear example where the word “man” means “human” and not just “adult male human”.
“Man is the thinking animal.” That obviously mean “human”, and not just the one gender.
How about Mark Twain’s work, What is Man? http://users.telerama.com/~joseph/wman.html Was Twain referring only to adult male humans, or humanity in general?
How about: http://salwen.com/mtquotes.html
“Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.”
Certainly these uses today are a little off-putting. That is because of our cultural shift. But the word does have that history. It is, perhaps, passe, but you cannot deny that it is the origin of the word. That is the point John W. Kennedy is making. To insist otherwise is ignorance.
Yeah, I’m unclear on exactly what jezzaOZ means by children’s language. I’m hoping s/he’ll jump back in–and that BunRab will forgive my blatant hijacking.
My first impression too was of a language spoken only by children and mostly incomprehensible to adults. But then it occurred to me that, if this children’s language had any sort of history (which, judging only from jezzaOZ’s guess about Old Norse roots, it does), the adults would themselves have spoken the language when they were kids. How would such a language be incomprehensible to adults if they themselves had spoken it as children? It seems unlikely that people would just ‘forget’ how to speak the language as they grew older, especially if the language continued to be spoken by other children around them.
The other possibility is what you suggested: that kids developed their own slang that adults couldn’t understand, by borrowing words from elsewhere or making up their own. Perhaps this is what jezzaOZ was talking about. JezzaOZ, help! Help!!
I am so glad you brought this up. The two different readings of Neil Armstrong’s famous quote results from use of “man” as either a mass noun or a count noun. When “man” appears with an article or some other determiner, it is a count noun–that is, it refers to a discrete, countable set of objects:
“That’s one small step for a man…” (i.e., one adult human male)
“I saw a man walking a dog” (i.e., one adult human male)
“I saw the men at the beach” (i.e., more than one adult human male)
When “man” appears with no determiner, it is (usually) a mass noun. It describes one big, nebulous thing you can’t count–here, all of humanity.
“That’s one small step for man…” (i.e., all of humanity)
All the quotes you cited used “man” as a mass noun. And as you point out, in this usage of “man,” the referent is all of humanity, male and female.
Which, to return to JWK’s point, still leaves us without a word to describe the set of all human males.
I am regretfully, not the best person to discuss this. I was young, my native language was English and I was living in an area whose native language was Scots, talking to children who spoke another language again.
Just to set the perspective, Scots is not English with a funny accent. It is a Germanic language related to Dutch and Africaans, as well as English. It is spoken by people living on the Eastern parts of Scotland. It is not Gaelic, which is a quite distinct language and is spoken in the Western part of Scotland. Scots is sufficiently similar to English that some people mistake it for the same language, which it is not.
Given the perspective of Scots as the regional language, I, a pur wee sassenach, had to contend with the kids speaking something different again. They would talk one way amongst themselves, and another way with the adults. I am sure adults knew the language, but did not use it in everyday use.
I remember thinking it was a strange language, the only thing similar to it in lylt, words and accents being Norwegian. I limped along as best I could, but never became proficient before I left the coast.
Later I learned more about the language in documents on languages and discovered about the Norse origins. It is a true language, spoken only by East Coast children and with no written tradition. I guess it will cease to exist fairly quickly with the new media
Jezza
BunRab doesn’t mind at all, since it’s interesting. (Making JWK froth at the mouth is fun, but it did get us rather far away from my original topic anyway, and I certainly don’t want Arnold to kick any asses, so let’s go with a change of subject.)
I’m curious about the assertion that Scots is not English. I would buy that it’s not American or English English, but it still looks waaaay more like an English dialect to me, than a separate language. I can read Scots fairly easily - as easily as Elizabethan English, and much more easily than I can read German (which I studied for a few years).
[font size=-2]Or Danish, which is just enough like German to cause confusion, at least in reading. (I’ve never heard spoken Danish.) A relative gave us once a Bible he thought was in German, and we started to read through it, and we were wondering, is this a weird dialect, or what - the pronouns were off, some of the verb conjugations were funny - but it still looked/read like German, until we finally came to various scraps of obituaries and notes stuck in the pages, that made it clear that it was Danish. I wonder if Danes and Germans see the two as being as closely related as they seemed to be, to me. Anyone know?)[/font]
Yes, there are a lot of odd words in Scots that don’t appear in other forms of English, but grammatically, and in the majority of vocabulary, it is well within the outlines of English. JezzaOZ, do you have any references I could look at, as to the issue of it being a separate language? I’d be interested in reading them. [font size=-2](Anything to put off working on my dissertation proposal!!)[/font]
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by BunRab *
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[QUOTE
I’m curious about the assertion that Scots is not English. I would buy that it’s not American or English English, but it still looks waaaay more like an English dialect to me, than a separate language. I can read Scots fairly easily - as easily as Elizabethan English, and much more easily than I can read German (which I studied for a few years)**[/QUOTE]
You could try http://www.scots-online.org/ or http://www.scotweb.co.uk/language/scots/leidwabsteid/Insular.htm
I have found a page on Shetlandic which seems to be close the the coastal children’s language. Look at http://www.geocities.com/jmtait/zet/ Here is an extract of a nursery rhyme : Speak it with a Norwegian lylt and it should soun a’richt. The full version is on http://www.geocities.com/jmtait/zet/groffram.htm
You guys were totally wrong about what JWK was saying about “man,” although it was an easy mistake to make.
I think this is what the man (giggle) was trying to say:
Yes, these days, the word “man” has one very strong meaning of “male human being,” among its other meanings.
HOWEVER, originally speaking, “man” was used to refer to all human beings…that is to say, it was not gender-specific.
My own feeling is that at the time when the word started to develop, women were not considered to be very important members of society. Therefore, when the word “man” was used, it more than likely referred to a MALE man (no, not a bad pun…bear with me) than to a FEMALE man. But this doesn’t change the fact that in principle, the word was meant to refer to human beings in general.
THEN (and I continue to speculate here), we enter the 20th century and people call increasingly for equality among the sexes. And one of the little details they get hung up on is the fact that “man,” though technically referring to all human beings, has always pretty much meant “MALE man.”
I guess what I’m trying to say is that JWK was talking about the original intent of the word, rather than its actual usage. I can see this seeming kind of ridiculous, because why argue about what a word means while ignoring how it is used? But speaking historically and precisely, “man” means “human being,” not “male human being.” The current usage is technically incorrect.
That’s what I think anyway. And having written out this academically sloppy post, I am off to look for cites…
Note:
Language definitions are really quite subjective and political. So the Scots want to call their dialect of English (related as I have read to Northern dialects of English, and in fact more heavily influenced by Nordic and other features) a language. Well, no different than other nationalists. But let us not pretend that there are objective definitions of language.
Collounsbury makes a good point. What we commonly call separate languages may really be dialects of the same language, and what we refer to as one language may be a collection of related but distinct languages.
From a linguistics standpoint–that is, ignoring politics–Language A and Language B are considered distinct languages if they are mutually incomprehensible. Likewise, if the speakers of Languages A and B can understand each other, we’ll call them dialects of one language.
Obviously, there’s a great big gray area between ‘mutually comprehensible’ and ‘mutually incomprehensible’ where no one can say with authority whether Language A and Language B are dialects of one language or [dialects of] two different languages. And one can also imagine a language with a whole spectrum of dialects (say, 1-7), where speakers of Dialect 3 can understand speakers of Dialects 2 and 4–their geographical neighbors–but can’t understand speakers who are farther out to either side of the spectrum. I’m thinking of German here.
The politics of classification tends to screw things up a bit, too. Dutch and Flemish are pretty much the same language, but spoken on different sides of a border. And ‘Chinese’ is a whole collection of mutually incomprehensible (but ultimately related) languages. (CAUTION: for these examples, I’m not writing from experience, just reporting what I learned in linguistics classes…)
This is why the question “How many languages are there in the world?” can never be answered with one exact number.
What’s the standard used for “mutually comprehensible”? I can read the original Chaucer, or that excerpt posted by jezzaOZ, and get the gist of most of it, and I imagine that if they were talking slowly, I could understand folks speaking either… But it takes a definite effort. Similarly, my mom has found that she can usually communicate effectively (admiteddly at a somewhat simple level) with folks who know only Spanish, by working from her dim memories of church-Latin, and Latin and Spanish are certainly different languages.
Dat’s the rub. There is no way to have an objective standard for mutually comprehensible since communication is a bit subjective and may vary by individual.
Nonetheless, I think the popular rule of thumb is able to sustain a normal conversation… But then what’s a normal convo?
Terrible quagmire.
So really there’s only one language, it’s just some of us speak it better than others. 
ducks and runs for cover
Well, for whatever it’s worth, as an American who’s spent far more time in England than Scotland, and read far more English than Scottish books (and no actual Scots at all, bar the odd bits of Burns), I certainly find Edinburgh and Ayr no more difficult to get around in than London. (I found Glasgow a bit rougher.)
But, in the end, this may be a case of the old jest: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by BunRab *
**
How could Danish, of all things, have looked like German? Danish is instantly recognisable by its crossed o. Are you sure it wasn’t a “weird dialect”?
Apologies; I really made a mess of that last post. The quoted text was in fact from BunRab.