sit down kids it’s time for a little language lession because i’m fucking tired of people spelling women as “womyn” and other derivatives and knowing jack shit about English

(please note that i’m doing this because as a feminist with an interest in linguistics, i cringe every time someone changes the word woman and thinks they’re doing it right when really they’re actually making things worse)

once upon a time in great britain (or thereabouts) people spoke funny. we call that Early Old English, and it was pretty weird sounding since we didn’t steal most of it from other languages

at about that time, a need arose for words meaning “human male” and “human female”. now keep in mind that transgender, agender, ect. were not even concepts in that time period, so don’t get pissy at me for how they went about things.

they came up with the word wyf (or wiifa, uif, and on at least one occasion Alduuif) for “human female”, unlike our use of it’s modern wife. And that’s what they used until about 1175, when wife became commonly used as meaning “a married female”. Wife was used to mean both until about the 1500s, when they realized “wait that’s really confusing ‘oh she’s a wife’ ‘well do you mean she’s married or what’” it also began to mean a marketer (a la fishwife or oysterwife), so one of the definitions had to go.

eventually some genius came up with wyfman, meaning female + human. Up until about the 1200s, the word “man” (as in human) had been used for both sexes indiscriminately  whereas males were referred to as were (male) and wapman (males, literally male + human). The only part left was the man, which eventually became used to denote both “human” and “human male”. 

Eventually, the word wyfman evolved and became the word woman. Still means female + human. That was never a thing that stopped being true.

By changing woman to womyn, you’re actually taking out the part of the word that denotes you as human, and leaving the part that ties you to a man. In essence, you’re going backwards. 

so in conclusion, if you’re going to insist on fucking with the English language to make a point that’s way less important than other things you should be focusing on, do some research. Instead of changing our words, why don’t we start referring to men as wipmen or weremen? Or hell, even heman if we can get around the copyright.

class dismissed

Sources:

http://thiswretchedhive.blogspot.com/2011/05/etymology-of-woman.html

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=woman

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Were

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6. carlmasis reblogged this from kattahj and added:

   This is a good point, and I wouldn’t doubt that that’s a main factor. Women were treated pretty shitty in the Bible...

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    I think wipmen sounds good ‘cuz weremen is too associated with wolves now, though wipmen sounds a bit like whipmen.

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    You know, I wonder if people think “woman” is a sexist term because they think of Genesis and “she shall be called...

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