This fortnightly feature was published on September 5

Story of man

IN modern English, the word man carries three major meanings. Everyone knows that a man is an adult male human being. In this sense; a man is not a woman and a woman is not a man. But earlier meanings of man are still around to create confusion. A dictionary will say that a man may be any human being, regardless of sex. Man without an article before it is also used collectively to mean human beings or the human race. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, he said, "That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Was he politically correct or not? Depends, did he mean one small step for a human being or one small step for a human male!

In earlier periods of the English language, the situation was simpler and more straightforward. In old English, man meant human being and was applied to members of both sexes. It corresponded to the Latin homo, human being. Wer meant male human being, also husband. Wif meant female human being, also wife. Over the years the general word man came to be applied specifically to the male as well as to the species as a whole. Meanwhile, the female came to be called wifmann or wimman or wummon or ultimately woman.

In the 16th century, the word man was still sometimes used to include both sexes. In 1597, a writer observed of Adam and Eve that ‘the Lord had but one paire of men in Paradise’. Even so the meaning of man had already shifted. When Shakespeare had Hamlet exclaim, "What a piece of work is man" he seemed to mean a human being as distinguished from a lower animal. But at the end of the same speech he narrowed the meaning down to the male sex, as distinguished from the female: "Man delights not me — nor women neither." By the 18th century, writers were having to specify when they meant man or men to include both sexes. David Hume wrote, "There is in all men; both male and female, a desire and power of generation".

Tap-root

Hindi has borrowed words from many languages and, in some instances the meaning of the word undergoes a transformation. The Arabic lifafa is one such word. In Arabic, lifafa is the cloth used to cover a dead person as well as the envelope for a letter. In Hindi, lifafa has contracted in meaning to only an envelope for a letter. Similarly, the Sanskrit vansh also meant bamboo but in Hindi it came to refer to family alone.

— Deepti