What is a human/woman/man?

[dust]

Simple question?

 

What is a

 

1. 'human'

2. 'woman'

3. 'man'

 

?

 

I've had this topic lying in a tab, waiting to be posted, for a week or so, and a recent topic on the board made me decide to go ahead and post it.

 

 

Wei Wu Wei moderation 'guidelines' (rules):

 

A definition, as opposed to an encyclopaedia entry, should be short, and as simple as possible.

 

If you feel that you can offer a sensible and concise definition of 'human', and then 'woman' and/or 'man', please try. A 'definition post' should consist of no more than two reasonably short sentences, and we're not looking for truisms (for example, "a woman is a female human" -- yes, sure, but what makes her female?).

 

Fellow members may question, and attempt to invalidate, any definitions offered if they so wish; or of course agree, if they agree.

 

Any post attempting to define the concept/word 'human' or 'man' or 'woman' in anything more than two reasonably short sentences (i.e. not much longer than the length of this sentence) will be removed! Any post not contributing to the actual discussion of definition of these terms will be removed! Obviously, posts containing misogyny or misandry will be removed!

Edited November 3, 2015 by dustybeijing

[Taomeow]

Woman -- womb-man, a mannaz (Proto-Germanic for "person" of unspecified gender) with a womb. 

Man -- derived from mannaz, person, and later reinterpreted so as to equate "person" with "male."

Human -- he-man, another reinterpretation, "a person is a male." 

[dust]

Thanks TM.

 

 

Woman -- womb-man, a mannaz (Proto-Germanic for "person" of unspecified gender) with a womb. 

Man -- derived from mannaz, person, and later reinterpreted so as to equate "person" with "male."

Human -- he-man, another reinterpretation, "a person is a male." 

 

Now.. in my opinion, each of these definitions relies on another fairly ambiguous word; what is a 'person'?

 

If we're looking at things through an etymological lens, a 'person' originally meant a 'mask, false face', and later 'human' -- and this doesn't tell us what a 'human' or 'person' is beyond an earlier term that the Greeks or Romans or French used.

 

I quite like your notion of 'woman'. In the OE Dict it's suggested that it comes from wife+man, but a 'womb-man' makes more logical sense (at least from a definition POV) to me. But: defining a man with a womb relies on having defined a 'man' (i.e. 'human' or 'person'); and what about someone who is not born with a womb?

Edited November 3, 2015 by dustybeijing

[Taomeow]

Thanks TM. I was going to respond to dawei, "I'm curious to see if anyone actually bothers to try!", but someone already has

 

 

 

Now.. in my opinion, each of these definitions relies on another fairly ambiguous word; what is a 'person'?

 

If we're looking at things through an etymological lens, a 'person' originally meant a 'mask, false face', and later 'human' -- and this doesn't tell us what a 'human' or 'person' is beyond an earlier term that the Greeks or Romans or French used.

 

I quite like your notion of 'woman'. In the OE Dict it's suggested that it comes from wife+man, but a 'womb-man' makes more logical sense (at least from a definition POV) to me. But: defining a man with a womb relies on having defined a 'man' (i.e. 'human' or 'person'); and what about someone who is not born with a womb?

 

 

Well, you know Chinese, right?  What's the Chinese word for "person" made out of, which radicals/notions/pictures/ideas? 

 

I have only scratched the surface of written Chinese (and not a deep scratch it is at that, yet), but I keep just positively yelping with delight every time I disassemble a word that is merely a sound in Indo-European languages yet often a whole worldview unfolding from a single Chinese character.  E.g., the character for "love" is put together out of two other characters -- one means "woman," the other one, "child."  Damn...  Instantly you see what they saw:  all love in existence is modeled on this one primary kind, and if this is messed up, it's something else, really...  "Love" is this, and then the whole machinery can work to produce it in many other circumstances -- but it has to be installed first and there's only this one way.  What is "love?"  This...  and all the later applications, modifications, utilizations and reverberations of this.    

 

So -- care to share what you know about "person" in Chinese?   

[dust]

Hehe.

 

人

 

The character for person is/was a pictograph of a person.

 

http://dict.shufaji.com/word-1414.html

 

I understand your joy at the discovery of the history/deeper meaning behind certain Chinese words. I was going to say that I don't think this one is particularly helpful. A stick-man drawing next to the definition for 'human'? But reading this part of the explanation:

 

躬身垂臂的劳作者，地球上唯一会创造文明符号、自觉进化的动物

 

my mind is changed slightly. It says,

 

Crooked-bodied, straight-armed labourer, the only animal on the planet capable of creating civilization and symbols (writing etc), and to have evolved self-awareness.

 

This does hit the mark for the points it makes, to an extent.

 

It's late but I will return to this tomorrow

Edited November 3, 2015 by dustybeijing

[Taomeow]

人  -- Shakespeare either knew this character, or had a similar vision. 

"Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal." 

from King Lear

Edited November 3, 2015 by Taomeow

[dawei]

人

 

 

躬身垂臂的劳作者，地球上唯一会创造文明符号、自觉进化的动物

 

my mind is changed slightly. It says,

 

Crooked-bodied, straight-armed labourer, the only animal on the planet capable of creating civilization and symbols (writing etc), and to have evolved self-awareness.

 

 

人  -- Shakespeare either knew this character, or had a similar vision. 

"Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal." 

from King Lear

 

The oracle bone symbols are a great symbol of the crooked-bodied one struggling to upright itself...  and the modern character of an erect body standing in perfect symmetry... fully aware (well... to a relative degree).

[Aithrobates]

Woman -- womb-man, a mannaz (Proto-Germanic for "person" of unspecified gender) with a womb. 

Man -- derived from mannaz, person, and later reinterpreted so as to equate "person" with "male."

Human -- he-man, another reinterpretation, "a person is a male." 

 

Woman: Something "Woman-man".

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

 

Note that we have too "queen" that in other languages is simply means "woman".

From that we got everyone's favorite greek "gune" that we have in all our gyn- words (gynecology, etc...)

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=queen&allowed_in_frame=0

 

Man: Ok, I agree.

 

Human: It's a latin etymology.

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

 

Did I mention that I like this Etymonline site ? ^^

[Andrei]

Human etymology comes from Latin "homo", which they say is the original word in Latin languages like Romanian but in actuality is the other way around, homo comes from a proto-indo-european language since it has its etymology in "OM" or "AUM" the primordial syllabus."Homo" became "humanus" which became "man" in Germanic languages.

 

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/homo#Latin

 

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/om#English

[Taomeow]

There's two etymologies of English words.  One, which I studied at the university, relies on the findings of Romano-Germanic linguistics, which is considered serious science, complete with Grimm's Law aka the First Germanic Sound Shift, and digging up proto-Indo-European roots out of Sanscrit words and the like.  We had an extraordinarily horrible professor for this.  He had every speech impediment under the sun -- mispronounced three quarters of the alphabet and slurred his speech -- AND lost his temper instantly and terribly when asked to repeat something -- and there was no textbook he would accept as source of our studies for the exams, it HAD to be his lectures.  It was impossible to take notes, nobody had them.  The first time he turned to the chalkboard to write something on it, we had a glimmer of hope that we might finally understand what he's teaching.  He started writing and turned out his handwriting was even less legible than his speech.  A sheer nightmare.  That's what Grimm's Law can do to its professional enforcer. 

 

So, this is the kind of etymology you get when you go to Wiki. 

 

And then there's the real thing, but...  

 

it is impossible to argue the real thing without accusing some well-established authorities of fraud.  Yet much of science coming out of Germany circa Brothers Grimm time (which constitutes the foundation of "all" we are taught as "modern science") was just that -- the continuation of their fairy tales.

 

The real etymology is something else...  I didn't say what I said because I don't know.  I said it because I know better.  

[dust]

Well, either way, the idea here is not to debate etymologies....

 

We can use etymology for assistance in discussion, but the focus is ideally to be on defining we mean by 'human', not explaining where the word 'human' came from.

 

For example, to define 'sock':

 

A garment for the foot and lower part of the leg, usually worn between foot and shoe, useful in regulating temperature and increasing shoe comfort. Typically knitted from wool, cotton, or nylon, and usually worn in pairs.

 

If we went into etymology of the word 'sock', we'd find a bunch of interesting historical stuff, e.g. "a lightweight shoe worn by ancient Greek and Roman comic actors". But we don't need to go there to define what we today mean by 'sock'.

 

So far, my presumption is being confirmed: there is no way to satisfactorily define any of the 3 main subjects of the thread...

[Taomeow]

The thing is, this is not a unique situation with these three.  You can't satisfactorily define anything else that really exists.  You can define only mental constructs.  Real stuff -- nope.  Can describe, can't define.  And how to describe something is also not a simple task, as infinite tasks go. 

 

Definitions are not part of reality.  Descriptions are pointers toward reality but also not it.  The difficulty with "human" is that you are one and that's how you know that no definition gets you and no description exhausts the subject. 

 

As usual, taoism to the rescue.  Taoists avoid defining anything and prefer to describe everything instead, but for complex phenomena they go in a roundabout way, by pointing out what that thing isn't.  Once you exclude everything this way that this thing could be mistaken for, whatever you are left with is it.

 

Even axiomatic definitions in taoist mathematics go, "this is as true as that the horse is not an ox."  Pretty clear, right? 

 

I could easily explain (to an alien from another planet who really doesn't know) what a human, man, woman are not.  Whatever remains is it.  

 

The great Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem, in his fundamental non-sci-fi work on the philosophy of science, Summa Technologiae,  gives a following example of the impossibility of definitions without descriptions.  A telegram (the book was written when they still existed) is intercepted by an alien civilization.  It says, "Granny died, funeral Wednesday."  To understand this text is impossible if that alien civilization

 

1)does not have the concept of "grandparent" because they, e.g., reproduce asexually, or even if they reproduce sexually, don't acknowledge grandparents as anything distinct or noteworthy (like we don't acknowledge totemic animals which some Native American tribes counted as "grandparents");

 

2) does not have a way to understand that "granny" and "grandmother" are the same thing because, e.g., they don't use two different ways to point to the same person in their language;

 

3) does not have a way to understand "funeral" because, e.g., they don't bury their dead -- say they evaporate, or dissolve, or are left to their own devices, or don't exist because everybody is as immortal as our jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii;

 

4) does not have a way to understand "Wednesday" because they don't keep time, or don't keep time the way we do, with chunks of it designated as "weeks" and with days of these weeks being of such a duration that an event can be planned ahead -- their days might be too short or too long for that, or not there altogether;

 

and so on.  So comprehension would be impossible without an extensive foray into human biology, social customs, beliefs, calendars and where these come from, and what we mean when we say that someone "died," and emotions -- emotions!!! -- how do we explain what we feel about granny if they don't know what granny is and...  and it's infinite.  The possibilities for the impossibility of definitions are infinite.

 

So, human?..  Ho-hum.  Define cat -- to a cat...  And then define cat to a snow leopard... 

 

Meow...

[vonkrankenhaus]

Human is a local condensation of all evolution.

 

Male/Female is a relative bifurcation of that.

 

 

 

-VonKrankenhaus

[silent thunder]

It's interesting to me, that humans are made entirely on non human stuff.

 

[Taomeow]

58 minutes ago, silent thunder said:

It's interesting to me, that humans are made entirely on non human stuff.

 

Everything else is also made of what it is not.  They don't say "the total is not the sum of its parts" for nothing. 

 

 

 

[silent thunder]

I derive deep comfort from this simple awareness.

water is not water... and yet it is water.

 

[AussieTrees]

Humans are a species that all begin life as females that is woman

The human male often forgets this important fact which is man.

 

Edited May 19, 2017 by AussieTrees

[Andrei]

Quote

Male/Female is a relative bifurcation of that.

This bifurcation started when bacteria started having sex.

[Apech]

According to the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word origins - man originally meant a person in Old English- woman is from wif ... so wif-man refering to specifically the childbearing 'man' mutates into wiman - then woman, while the male was called wer which is still found in were-wolf and other words.  I know that in the Domesday Book (1068) - whoever was in charge of land was called 'the man' whether the person was male or female. So by the way, womb-man seems to be a false etymology for woman.

The possible Indo European roots are either from mens 'to think, to breathe' or from man as in 'hand' thus words like manipulate or manage.

Human on the other hand is from Latin humanus, linked to homo etc and also humus meaning 'earth' thus earthly beings and not gods or spirits.

 

[Taomeow]

Ah, the wonders of Wiki. 

 

Of course the sources it peruses were fabricated when there were no female linguists. 

 

Now that they exist, I prefer some of their interpretations, including the tongue-in-cheek ones. 

 

Check out something more interesting on the subject:

https://blog.oup.com/2011/10/wife/

[Apech]

29 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

Ah, the wonders of Wiki. 

 

Of course the sources it peruses were fabricated when there were no female linguists. 

 

Now that they exist, I prefer some of their interpretations, including the tongue-in-cheek ones. 

 

Check out something more interesting on the subject:

https://blog.oup.com/2011/10/wife/

 

Good link thanks.