Wrong, there is no such thing as an “earless”. The wife of an earl is a countess. On theory as to why the English didn’t adopt the title “count” after the Norman Conquest because it sounded to much like a certain another word.
same job, but male and female are totally unrelated words:
butler/ maid
barber/hairdresser
These and some others are good examples, although it’s interesting to note that a significantly different image is brought to mind for each gender’s title. In pairs like waiter/waitress or actor/actress there is very little difference, at least in my mind, and it’s really the exact same job being done by different genders.
Not really. “Witch” and “wizard” are both “wise one”, or something similar, while “warlock” is more like “oathbreaker”. I think the only reason witches got associated with warlocks is that (probably for misogynistic reasons), witches became associated with evil forces, in a way that wizards, by and large, didn’t.
And I would regard “hairdresser” as being a unisex term, without any real specifically-female equivalent to “barber”.
Uncle/Aunt
Brother/Sister
Son/Daughter
Did you miss “for example”?
Isn’t that the point?
master/mistress
Actually, I believe that witch (wit-ch) and wizard (wise-ard) are related, both deriving from the Old English for wise, educated, or knowledgeable person, from the same sourcethat we get the words “wise”, “wit”,“witness” (person with knowlege), “unwittingly” (without knowledge) and the name of the religion of Wicca.
What a diplomatic blunder to show up with a gift of earrings for her. :eek:
Do you care only about the current form of the words or the historical root? Because these pairs are from the same root:
Lord/Lady - from hlāford/hlǣfdīġe, both incorporating hlāf, “loaf”
master/mistress - both descended (through different lines) from Latin magister, teacher
Funny, I thought you were making up seamster. Nope. It’s a real word. Of course here is the definition in the free online dictionary I found it in.
Those shouldn’t be the same; a seamster is a guy who repairs clothes, a tailor is someone who makes them.
(In my part of the world there is a monetary difference as well)
Interesting. I only looked it up because seamster really seemed like a made-up word to me. I commented on it because the first definition I found for it was simply “A tailor.”
Looking further the next 4 I found also call them tailors.
It may be that your location has a more specific meaning for the two words but I don’t think saying a seamster is a tailor is completely wrong.
Your definition of the two lend credence to the seamstress ailor combo though.
Here’s another one:
midwife/babygetter
(or something like that, right?)
Midhusband.
No, midwife is actually gender neutral the “wife” part refers to the woman giving birth. In Old English mid=with and wif=woman so “midwife” actually means “with woman”.
That depends on what literary rtadition one follows. There was a flurry of “witch vs warlock” citations from fantasy literature in the 1940s through 1960s, but the actual word witch, meaning anyone who exercised powers through sorcery, first showed up in English with male and female gender endings.
It is true that warlock, meaning one who breaks faith, has always been masculine, but witch, (and its earlier antecedents), has never precluded the masculine.
This was something that was pushed in the mid 20th century to support the new Wiccan religion, but it is not accurate.
The word wise had a rarely attested alternative spelling of wice, but the words for witch, wicce and wicca, always meant evil manipulators of sprirtual powers and were never associated with wisdom.
gigolo and mistress?
so they share the same root word - 皇. tenno would be “heavenly 皇”, and a kogo would be “behind the 皇”.