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SEXIST LINGUISTICS

11/30/2018

2 Comments

 
This is less of a single etymology and more of a bunch of sexist linguistic connections that aren't intricate enough to get their own stories, but definitely worth sharing, nonetheless:
  • In Chinese, the character for "woman" is 女 while the word for "quarrel" or "dispute" is 奻, or "two women". Thankfully, the latter is falling out of use, but it is still a thing.
  • In Spanish, esposa means "wife" and esposas are handcuffs (connected through Latin spondere, "to bind")
  • In Dutch, gift simultaneously means "marriage" and "poison". These both might be from a root meaning "to give".
  • In English, people refer to their wives as "the old ball and chain"
  • 女 in Japanese also means "woman", but three of those characters in a triangle can mean "noisy"
It is a popular misconception that English woman is equivalent to womb + man, but this is wrong. In Old English, it was a word basically meaning "female human". While this may not have been a misogynistic origin, they abound elsewhere, as you can see above
2 Comments
Berna
12/3/2018 07:34:01 am

'Gift' doesn't mean 'marriage' in Dutch. It does mean 'poison', though 'vergif' or 'gif' are more usual words for that, and 'gift, donation'; and it's an old word for 'dose', like of a medicine. I've read something like this before, though, but I can't remember which language it was that 'gift' means 'marriage' – maybe something Scandinavian?

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Adam Aleksic link
12/3/2018 11:58:26 am

Thank you for the correction! It seems like the word died out and was only present in older versions of Dutch. There does seem to be a Scandinavian ancestor.

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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic. I have a linguistics degree from Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote my thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy traveling, trivia, philosophy, board games, conlanging, and art history. 

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