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Different forms for male and female in english

Why do most nouns in English don't have different forms for male and female, but some do (like actor/actress, widow/widower)?


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Many of the masculine terms in Modern English come from gender neutral terms in Old English. For example, the word man was originally gender neutral and could be qualified to specify male or female. While the male qualification died out, the female wíf (which produced woman) survived, leaving man with both its original gender-neutral meaning (people), especially in compounds such as mankind, and the gender-specific meaning, male.

Both Ancient Greek and Classical Latin show a similar process for anthropos and homo respectively. Both of these words mean "man/humanity in general" or "human being": as in the modern anthropology or homo sapiens. For "male human as opposed to female human", there exist the separate words aner and vir (roots of the English androgynous and virile, respectively).

Most modern descendants of the Latin homo such as French homme, Italian uomo, and Spanish hombre are grammatically masculine and contain two meanings: 1) a male human and 2) any human being (e.g. French Musee de l'homme for an anthropology museum exhibiting human culture, not specifically "male culture"). These languages therefore lack a third, neutral option between the gender-specific words for man and woman as homo or anthropos provided. In Romanian, however, the cognate om retains its original meaning of "any human person", as opposed to the gender-specific words for man and woman (bÇ?rbat and femeie, respectively).

The word human is from Latin humanus, the adjectival form of homo.

During the 19th century, attempts to overlay Latin grammar rules onto English required the use of feminine endings in nouns ending with -or. This produced words like doctress and professress and even lawyeress, all of which have faded from use; though waitress, stewardess, and actress persist.

Belief in social effects of language was largely a 20th century phenomenon in the English-speaking world, and has been linked to the development of the principle of linguistic relativity by Benjamin Whorf and others

http://www.godseye.com/stat/en/g/e/n/Gender-neutral_language.html 

 

  A nice link with a comprehensive list of examples:

http://www.indiana.edu/~lggender/vocabulary.html

http://linguistlist.org/issues/7/7-419.html


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English is a living language and affected by everyday usage. This has brought about a simplification of speech so that there are many changes . One example is aviator. Years ago the feminine form was aviatrix; today aviator is common usage. Another strong influence on language is the media especially television.


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