But with ‘son’ in the word doesn’t it’s usage continue to promote the patriarchy?
Point being, perception of a word can be more meaningful to some people than the historical meaning.
Good 'ole prescriptive vs descriptive linguistics...
For example, some have claimed that if we had no separate terms for "man and woman", "male and female", etc, we'd be unable to perceive a difference between the two.
> the etymological root was gender neutral, with a separate word attested for "masculine" man
For anyone playing at home, this is "were" or "wer". The phrase "man and woman" would once have been something like "were and wif", which is where the "were-" in "werewolf" comes from, and is the ancestor of "wife".
If we want English to be more gender-neutral, we could revert to werman, wifman and man.
(and probably more who use examples of it in bad faith arguments presuming that such groups exist in larger numbers, e.g. "look at those crazy feminists!")
> If we want English to be more gender-neutral, we could revert to werman, wifman and man.
There's a part of me that loves this idea, even if I recognize the absurdity of suggesting it. I guess it's made more sense to me than trying to replace a large portion of English vocab en masse, like all the vocational terms ending in "-man".
A curious example of a Germanic cousin of English that underwent the same "masculinization" of the word man but "came back" is Swedish, where the word "man" means "adult male", but is also used as a neuter pronoun meaning "generic person" (usually translated as "one" in English).
As far as I know the other Nordic languages didn't develop this usage, but I'm less familiar with them.
We sort of have this in English too: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind". Although I can't think of any cases where we use "man" alone to mean "one".
Time to rewrite the history books! (1984 anyone?)
"_Man_ borde inte tvinga andra att anpassa sig efter en skrikig minoritet" (_One_ should not force others to conform to a loudmouthed minority)