Whence Cometh Woman?
by
Howard
Richler
March 8th
designates International Women’s Day, which has been celebrated since 1975 and
since the lady has been honoured for 54 years, it is now incumbent that we turn our attention to the oft-misunderstood origin
of the word “woman.” Discussions about this word’s origin inevitably entails someone
becoming apoplectic that woman ends in “man.” (I mean, how controlling do men
have to be?) This supposed outrage has led to other alleged affronts, such as
feeling that the word history is sexist and should be accompanied by “herstory.”
Truth be told, however, the word woman does not designate that a woman is a “wo”
version of a male, nor does she represent a compound of womb and man. Woman started out as wifman in Old English with man only designating “person” Hence, wifman, only meant “female person.” We
find in Beowulf, written sometime
between 975 and 1025, the designation woepnedman
for the male of the species and woepned referrred not only to maleness but also to “pertaining to weapons.” Another term for
my bellicose gender was the term guma or
gome which enjoys a half-life in the
word “bridegroom.”
By the end of the Old English period the f of wifman was disappearing
and thus emerged wiman and by the 13th
century we see the form “woman” developing. Woman didn’t finally jettison the
two more ancient words for female person wif
and the more obsolete quean until
the end of the Middle English period. By the way, the semantic restriction of
wife to “married person” began in the Old English period and became more
entrenched in subsequent centuries. Likewise, history doesn’t designate “his
story” and derives from the classical Latin historia, “account of events” and
even further back we find the Greek histor,
“learned man.”
But the question remains, is the woman a lady? Etymologically, the answer is settled. If she
kneads bread, she’s a lady. The term derives from the Old English hlafdi which represents a sandwich
comprised of hlaf (from whence we get
“loaf”) “bread,” and the root -dig “knead”
(related to the English “dough.”) The lady’s hubby, the lord, is the guardian
of the bread, hlafweard, which was
then rendered as hlaford and in the 14th century this became shortened to
the single syllable “lord.”
So while the lady’s provenance is
crystal-clear, matters are fuzzier with the lady’s earlier state — “girl.” We do know, however, that the term
was originally gender-neutral and meant “child”; a male child was a “knave-girl.”
Strangely, there is not a definitive term for a female child and the only
recorded usages are “gay girl” and “little girl.” Through the process the
semantic narrowing the word “girl” came to refer to only female children
starting in the latter part of the 14th century. There are many
theories of where the term came from originally, but all seem fairly
conjectural in nature.
We do, however, know more about some of the familial terms
for females. In fact, the word daughter can be traced back to the Indo-European
dhughater and the Sanskrit duhitr. Originally, the word daughter
was pronounced to rhyme with the words “rafter,” and “laughter,” not surprisingly
because in English the “gh” sound is often pronounced as an “f” as in the words
“rough” and “enough.” We see the spelling “dafter” during the Salem Witch
Trials of 1692 and a century later in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard,
Based on Her Diary 1785-1812.
Aunt derives from the French tante. However, tante
itself was a modification of the spelling of the original French word which was
rendered as aunte.
In any case whether you are a woman, lady, girl, daughter or
aunt, and possibly have enjoyed all these designations at one juncture in your
life, enjoy this year’s International Women’s Day.
Howard’s latest book is Wordplay:Arranged
and Deranged Wit.
