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Subject:Re[2]: Grad school (PhDs) From:Jane Torpie <Jane_Torpie_at_III-HQ -at- RELAY -dot- PROTEON -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 1 Nov 1993 11:39:00 EST
Richard E. Howland-Bolton writes:
" 4) A side issue, but the man-word used to be, from the earliest times till
relatively recently, considered quite inclusive enough. Our ancestors used
"mon" or "man" much more to mean "human" than we do. They used words for
males and females which have, in the case of the female been restricted (as
in wife) or subsumed into a compound (woman), and in the case of the male
been almost wiped out (were-wolf, or -geld survive in historical writing, a
lot of specialized terms are gone, and words from latin vir survive with
semantic shift--virility etc.) "
I learned in German language classes that "man" is a pronoun-type of
construction meaning non-gender-specific "one."
_______________________________________________________________________
Jane Torpie
Senior Technical Writer
Easel Corporation
Burlington, MA
Jane_Torpie_at_III-HQ
