Mannaz

Mannaz or Manwaz is the Proto-Germanic term for "man", in the gender-neutral sense of "person, human being".

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The word developed into Old English man, mann "human being, person," (c.f. also German Mann, Old Norse ma?r, Gothic manna "man").

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It is derived from a Proto-Indo-European base *man-, with a variant *mon- (cf. Sanskrit/Avestan manu-, Russian muzh "man, male"). Some etymologies treat the root as an independent one, as does the American Heritage Dictionary. This is perhaps the safest approach. If there are any further connections, they are not known, and there may not be. After all, men existed and must have had a word in the language(s) preceding Indo-European.

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Of the etymologies that do make connections with other Indo-European roots, man "the thinker" is the most traditional — that is, the word is connected with the root *men- "to think" (cognate to mind). This etymology presumes that man is the one who thinks, which fits the definition of man given by Rene Descartes as a "rational animal", indebted to Aristotle's ???? ????? ????, which is also the basis for Homo sapiens (see Human self-reflection). This etymology is however not generally accepted.

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A second etymology postulates the reduction of the ancestor of "human" to the ancestor of "man". Human is from *dhghem-, "earth". *(dh)ghom-on- is some sort of ?earthling? and it is up to us to guess what. The word would reduce to just its final syllable, *m-on-. You may find this point of view in Eric Partridge, Origins, under man. Such a derivation may be credible if we had only the Germanic form, but the attested Indo-Iranian manu virtually excludes the possibility.

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The earthmen also fit certain attendant circumstances. Tuisto, father of Mannus, is the god who sprang from the earth.

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Restricted use of man in the sense "adult male" only began to occur in late Old English, around 1000 AD, and the word formerly expressing male sex, wer had died out by 1300 (but survives in e.g. were-wolf and were-gild). The original sense of the word is preserved in mankind, from Old English mancynn.

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*Manus in Indo-European mythology was the first man, see Mannus, Manu (Hinduism)

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In the twentieth century, the generic meaning of "man" declined still further (but survives in compounds "mankind", "everyman", "no-man", etc), and is now mostly seen as archaic, with the word used almost exclusively to mean "adult male". Interestingly, exactly the same thing has happened to the Latin word homo: in most Romance languages, homme, uomo, hombre, homem have come to refer mainly to males, with residual generic meaning.

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Mannaz is also the reconstructed name of the m-rune .

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Proto-Germanic: Proto-Germanic (often abbreviated PGmc.), or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor (proto-language) of all the Germanic languages such as modern English, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Luxembourgish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and...

Man: :This article concerns man in the sense of "human male". For other meanings of man see Man (disambiguation)....

Old English: Old English (Englisc, Anglisc, Ænglisc) or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily th...