Talk:Man (word)

I'm removing the following claim as it has been tagged with {{tl|fact}} for several months:

• it is possible that future generations will see it [the term "man" in the generic meaning "human being"] as totally archaic, and use it solely to mean "adult male"

If anyone can find a source, feel free to re-add it. —Angr 20:51, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

:How can there be a source that tells about the future? That makes no sense. Voortle 16:05, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

::Well, it's theoretically possible to find a source that makes that prediction. —Angr 21:49, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

:::Well, at least to me, it seems that it already is the way stated in the prediction now. People rarely use "man" to refer to all humans. Voortle 00:07, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

The discussion should currently be held at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Ancient_Germanic_studies/Runes#Mannaz. –Holt T•C 18:33, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

:The discussion has been moved to Talk:Mannaz. –Holt T•C 14:12, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I've been walking through the articles on this word and related terms, and there's been a good faith effort to construct a rational narrative whereby the term was once generic, or at least primarily meant humankind, and underwent semantic narrowing to mean "adult male human" -- with the more general sense now distantly secondary, archaic, even offensive. I think that last part is true, but the earlier narrative just isn't that simple. OE had multiple words meaning adult male human, and that seems to have been the primary usage of man, if you look at its occurences in the extant literature. Secondarily it could refer to humans in general, or to a particular human whose gender was not known or specified, but this is by far the minority of cases. OE dictionaries give the gender-specified sense as primary. DavidOaks (talk) 19:54, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

This text needs some serious work to become more accessible for people who aren't "sociolinguists" (a term which was new to me). It's poorly and convolutedly written and full of unexplained academic jargon.

"The equation of the male with the species is commonly occurring in other languages (e.g. French l'Homme), particularly in traditional registers, but not uniformly even within language groups. For example, the German equivalent of "Man" is "Mensch" which is male grammatically (itself a possible expression of the tradition as this is an exception to normal morphology which would have Mensch neuter) but refers to a general person not a male one. The usage persists in all registers of English although it has an old-fashioned tone." What?!

The meaning of the word "register" here may not even be clear to linguists, as "register" can have two very different meanings within linguistics - and for most non linguists, the noun "register" has something to do with record keeping.

Apparently, according to the article Register (sociolinguistics), the term was coined by a linguist in 1956 and his disciples started to spread it around. It's atually nothing but hyped-up jargon for the easily understood word "style", and, according to that article, "Writers (especially in language teaching) have often used the term "register" as shorthand for formal/informal style, although this is an aging definition. Linguistics textbooks may use the term "tenor" instead, but increasingly prefer the term "style" – "we characterise styles as varieties of language viewed from the point of view of formality" (Trudgill, 1992) – while defining "registers" more narrowly as specialist language use related to a particular activity, such as academic jargon."

This article is in desperate need of a rewrite, but unfortunately I have neither the time or the interest to do it. Thomas Blomberg (talk) 15:16, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

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