Context:
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
Don't forget that this is an English language translation of an ancient Hebrew text. Don't expect it to make linguistic sense in English. There is no reason whatever why "wo" could mean "be taken out of" in English. It's a case of a one-time only usage.
0 Replies
OmSigDAVID
1
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Mon 19 Aug, 2013 07:01 pm
@oristarA,
My sense of the situation
(inferentially, without actual etymological research)
is woman = man of the womb; womb man.
I doubt very much that in ancient Hebrew the word for "womb" is cognate with the English word "womb." Hebrew is not an Indo-European language and has no known antecedents in Sanskrit. You may be correct, of course, in surmising that this is where we get the word "woman" in English; it doesn't come from either the old Germanic Anglo-Saxon nor the later Norman French.
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OmSigDAVID
2
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Mon 19 Aug, 2013 07:12 pm
It has been my observation that the female gender
is a lot more concerned with reproduction than is the male.
not to say that thay r mobile wombs, no, no, absolutely not
0 Replies
izzythepush
1
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Tue 20 Aug, 2013 05:37 am
@oristarA,
A lot of radical feminists take this a step further by changing the spelling of women to wimmin, and History to Herstory, even though the root of History does not signify gender.
woman (n.)
late Old English wimman (plural wimmen), literally "woman-man," alteration of wifman (plural wifmen), a compound of wif "woman" (see wife) + man "human being" (in Old English used in reference to both sexes; see man (n.)). Cf. Dutch vrouwmens "wife," literally "woman-man."
The formation is peculiar to English and Dutch. Replaced older Old English wif and quean as the word for "female human being." The pronunciation of the singular altered in Middle English by the rounding influence of -w-; the plural retains the original vowel. Meaning "wife," now largely restricted to U.S. dialectal use, is attested from mid-15c. Women's liberation is attested from 1966; women's rights is from 1840, with an isolated example in 1630s.
Linguistically, "rounding influence" refers to the influence of the /w/ on the proceeding vowel /i/ in the Old English word wimman, changing it to /o/ in the pronunciation of the Middle English woman.
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PUNKEY
1
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Tue 20 Aug, 2013 01:03 pm
" This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man."
This has nothing to do with the words or letters.
It's bible belief that woman was created from the rib of man, as his equal (to walk beside him, not in front or behind him.)
0 Replies
izzythepush
1
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Tue 20 Aug, 2013 02:18 pm
@oristarA,
oristarA wrote:
Quote:
woman (n.)
late Old English wimman (plural wimmen), literally "woman-man," alteration of wifman.
When I was living in Newcastle upon Tyne, all the lads used to refer to the girls as wifies.
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