Re: Pub Quiz [2003/11/25]

 ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) writes:
> The usage is now obsolescent. You still occasionally hear "man" used
> meaning "mankind", as in "the ascent of man" but even that is
> beginning to sound old-fashioned.  A sentence  containing "a man", like
> "I saw a man walking along the street" would always refer to a male in
> modern usage.

I have never seen "a man" used in gender-neutral sense. (But I see
some examples on http://www.m-w.com, see entry 2.) But "man" without
an article refers to the entire human race, both men and women. And
this usage seems to be anything but obsolete, a search on Google for the 
phrase "Man has always" yields 13100 hits. Of those displayed on the 
first page, nine of ten are references to mankind, and one to a man.
 
> Well it seems totally stupid to me to have a word which can
> either mean " a human being" or "a male human being". What reason
> could there be for having a word which is inherently ambiguous?

Language is not he result of deliberate design, but an evolvement over
time, and there few languages are flawless in the sense that they do
not have any ambiguities. You cannot always find a reason for why
language is like it is.

In Swedish by the way, "man" is also ambiguous. It can refer to a male
human being" or it can be an impersonal pronoun. "Man kan inte alltid
få som man vill" - "You (one) can not always get what you want". The
way it is used, the best translation into English would often be "I" -
even if the speaker is a woman: "Man har inte haft någon lyckad dag idag",
literaly: "One has not had any good day today".

>> "Man" in that meaning translates in Swedish to "människa" which 
>> grammatically is female.
> 
> So what? Grammatical genders do not always correlate with physical ones!
> A person is feminine in Fench, little girls are neuter in German, etc.

Precisely! The eager to stamp out "man" for "the human race", "he" as
a generic pronoun etc, comes from a perceived sexism in the language.
 


-- 
Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, [EMAIL PROTECTED]