0:23 same in Polish. Today "żona" means wife, but it used to mean "woman" (and still does in other Slavic languages) - we still use "żeński" for adjectives like in "rodzaj żeński" ("feminine gender", or rather "feminine type" as we call it). The modern Polish word for woman, "kobieta", used to be an insult - "kob" is an old word for a pigpen, and "-eta" indicated a close relationship with it - so calling someone "kobieta" used to be like calling someone a dirty pig (or cow, or other farm animal like that). It only lost that pejorative meaning around 150 years ago.
I appreciate the extra time taken to delve into the etymology of wīfmann. You could’ve just left it at “here is the older version of the word which had an ī sound” and not explained the etymology, but that was actually the most interesting part of the video!
photograph and photographer sound completely different when pronounced but they are spelled similarly to show that one is derived from the other. this is sort of like how in french vert is pronounced "ver", but the word is still spelled with a t to show that it is related to the feminine form verte, which is pronounced with a t.
@@Designed1 I'm pretty sure if "vert" had no "t" the feminine would be "vere". It's not "related to the feminine form", it's just how most of the feminine words are built up, so basically it's the other way round: feminine form is related to the masculine one As a french learner, you can't predict that the feminine of "doux" would be "douce" and not "douxe". And if I apply what you said, the masculine of "douce" isn't "douc" (which has a completely different pronunciation)
That backing effect of 'w' was a bit late to the party in Northern England. You still sometimes here 'water' rhyme with 'fatter', or 'warm' with 'arm'. In the fifties some folk would basically have all those wa- words un-backed: there's recordings where 'watch' rhymes with latch, 'wasp' with 'asp' etc., Not sure if anyone still speaks like that today though maybe up in the North East or perhaps in Scotland?
Fun fact: in Old English, the word for "male human" was "wereman", and this is why a person that turns into a wolf when the moon is full is called a werewolf. By that logic, a female werewolf would be called a wifwolf.
so the words wouldnt just be pronounced the same, as it evolved the lasdt vowel just changed into a schwa so the first stressed vowels being different differentiated the two. source? i made it the fuck up
Pretty sure due to umlaut, a common thing in germanic languages where vowels affect each other. The e in the -en plural ending prob influenced the i to stay the same since they're both front vowels
@@ratrick8858 I hope it is that, As that was my original theory for the pronunciation at all, Thinking it was originally an 'o', So if that is right it'd mean I was still like half-right lol.
I LOVE your content man. I mean, I can't get enough of language knowledge, for some reason I'm just in love with it, and I'm just discovering it now, thanks to you!
Tangentially related: Since "wer" was the word for "male" back in the day, the term "werewolf" would technically only apply to a male creature, and a female one would be a "wifwolf." Of course, such a word is unattested except in conversations bringing this etymology up, so take that as you will. On a further tangent, someone once suggested that a trans woman could be called a "werewif" and I thought that was adorable.
We need to bring back wer (let’s keep this spelling to not confuse past tense “were”). “Man” is still used to mean “person” in niche context, but I’d bring it back to mean the original sense as in “mankind”.
@@danielantony1882 You'd as attach wyff (I think that's how it's spelled) to them, and it would indicate that they're female. In fact that's the etymology of the word woman, wyffmann is the original, and that's what it means, female human.
@@CallanElliott That spelling is not Old English, it’s Middle English. There are no derivative words related to female animals that I can find under the word “wīf” in the Wiktionary. That means it doesn’t apply to animals. It’s exclusive to humans.
@@danielantony1882 I mean Wiktionary isn't an absolute source, and I don't know the proper Old English, I just know that fact, and I communicate it with the spellings I know. Which are also the ones most people will recognise.
In Icelandic, we have the words Víf and Ver, meaning woman and man. Both of these words you'll rarely see outside of poetry nowadays, but they are still in some use today.
Uncertain, but it might be by influence of other singular/plural pairs having “oo” sounds in the singular and “ee” sounds in the plural (tooth/teeth, foot/feet, etc) so woman/women may have had phonological influence from those
Is there a term or anything interesting about dialects merging back together? I've noticed that lots of teens in the UK have started using american vocabulary like Zebras for instance becoming Zee-bra instead of the typical Zeh-bra.
@@humanteneleven Always happy to see content creators recommending each other, especially when it's toward people as great as Dr. Lindsay! His stuff is both approachable and really in-depth!
Interestingly, the Ukrainian word for a male, *чоловік* (čolovik) formerly simply meant a human/person as well, later starting meaning a male (mainly for being masculine). More interestingly, the newly adopted word for a human, *людина* (ljudyna) etymologically meaning “a people-something” with a suffix, is feminine, a unique case for Indo-European languages. Btw “inhuman” is *нелюд* (neljud) which is masculine again
@@danielantony1882 in every other Slavic language, even in Rusyn (which is basically Carpathian Ukrainian) чоловік means a human: чалавек, човек, człowiek, člověk, čovek, čovjek etc. Yet, in any other Slavic one again, чоловік means a man too. One can arrogantly call a waiter with “čovječe!” in Croatian, but not a waitress. Also, in modern russian, the set phrase «молодой человек» a young human, means either a boyfriend or a male stranger (regardless of the age)
Also, obviously, the difference in pronunciation has been maintained in order to distinguish the plural from the singular, even if the difference originally wasn't in the first vowel
Of course english is inconsistent and complicated, it evolved from old germanic dialects and as a german I can confirm german is inconsistent and complicated. Our languages has the same roots, no wonder
English is inconsistent and complicated because it contains words from Celtic, Germanic and Latin (via French) roots, each of these groups having totally different pronunciation rules. As the old saying goes, "English is three languages stacked on top of each other, wearing a trenchcoat and pretending to be one."
In Spanish mujer can also be used in place of esposa/marida, just depends on the culture, I remember when I tried to use duolingo to learn german for a short period of time frau could also mean wife, and I think mann as husband too but I don’t remember, depends on the culture
Interesting, I recall theorising a while ago that it was actually the opposite; The 'o' was the original prinunciation, And there's an 'i' in "Women" due to some form of umlaut or affectation of the following 'e', Before it got reduced to a schwa. Although I suppose I was wrong.
@efthimiossakarellos7150 Same here although English is my second language so I should have learned the normal pronunciation but it sounds so much more natural with an o sound
In portuguese in weddings the Priest says " eu vos declaro marido e mulher" "i declare you husband and women" so women can also serve as Just wife. Like "a mulher do pedro" "pedro's wife/women"
In spanish is the same "marido y mujer", where "mujer" means "woman" and "wife". It would be interesting to know if this woman-wife phenomenon happens in other languages as well, maybe outside the Proto-Indo-European descendants
This is really interesting how it started vs how its used nowadays, maybe they didn't have such sexist thinking back then in some areas as like in the "default male assumption"¹ but nowadays its sadly still pretty popular... so mankind started as human but then man was male human... im confused was there another term for male human as in ___man or was it just man as human and male human the same back then too like in " "¹? Really interesting vid !
I’m Canadian, and I’ve only really heard people pronounce the O with actually significant emphasis for some reason. Not sure why we do it differently, but it always sounds off when I heard people in videos and such say it with the I sound
So they decided to re-spell it with an o to be consistent with the singular spelling? Imagine if swim, swam, and swum all had the same spelling for the sake of consistency, but still were pronounced differently. Also, this is pretty much unrelated to the video, but you know the pattern /CiːC/ - /CɛCt/ - /CɛCt/ that some strong verbs have, like dream - dreamt - dreamt and mean - meant - meant? Well, I'm a non-native speaker, so I have to simply learn which verbs follow this pattern, and which don't. And it's messing with my brain, like I tend to form V2/V3 of clean /kliːn/ as cleant /klɛnt/ instead of cleaned, of heat /hiːt/ as heat /hɛt/ instead of heated, and of treat /triːt/ as treat /trɛt/ instead of treated. Also, not that same pattern, but one day something made me think that V2 and V3 of move /muːv/ are move /moʊv/ and moven /ˈmuːvən/ respectively. And just to clarify: I've been learning English for over ten years.
I like to make mistakes like these on purpose, like to stream - the event was streamt live; or german "gerädert", incorrectly translated as wheeled, but then make it whelt for extra spice. Also, you are using proper longness markers instead of colons. That's some attention to detail!
@tfan2222 It may sound obscure, but it is a word. Maybe in your dialect/sociolect/whatever you say ‘swimmed’/‘swam’ (e.g ‘I have never swimmed/swam’), or you don't use that word at all, but ‘swum’ is considered the standard past participle form of ‘swim”.
Wow I never thought about this, I've always kinda pronounced the plural "women" the same as the singular "woman" with more of an O or "uh" sound instead of the i.
Within the biblical languages, “wife” was literally “his woman”. Sound bad until you realize “husband” was literally “her man”. It appears from the etymology shown in this video that “wife” had a similar origin.
Compound as a verb and compound as in a building complex are from two different roots. One is from Latin, the other is from Malay, surprisingly enough.
@@georgio101Both "male" and "female" are from Latin via French, but the "male" in "female" is not related to the word "male" even though the spelling makes it seem so. One is from "masculus" and the other from "femella", equivalent to modern French "mâle" and "femelle" respectively.
Interesting. When I was school my language teacher was an expert in old English and he taught us that Woman came from Wambmann - man with a womb so I assume this is now outdated?
Have you noticed that in the last couple of years people have started pronouncing the singular and the plural the same way both as the singular (pronouncing “women” as “woman”). I think this might particularly be the case with GenZ. The pronunciation is morphing and I’m not sure why, but I wonder if it is the influence of parents and community members who are non-native speakers who did it know about this difference in pronunciation themselves so the kids and their friends have native American English accents yet pronounced this one word “women“ differently.
wermann wer = male, survived in Modern English "werewolf" human is borrowed from Latin "hūmānus" (via French "humain"), which is derived from "homō". Then "homō" is thought to be derived from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰmṓ which is a derivation of *dʰéǵʰōm (earth). So it literally means "earthling"
Very interesting! But you've just pushed the question off by one level. Why didn't the pronunciation of the plural change, the same way the pronunciation of the singular changed? They seem very similar.
There are two more quirks with wifmann. Old English had grammatical gender, and you'd expect wif and wifmann to match the actual gender of a woman, but no, wif was neuter, and wifmann was masculine (because mann was masculine). The chief words in English for female people were never feminine in Old English
I remember having a feeling of a great insight when I realized that woman comes from womb-man. Alas, great insights are not always correct.
💀
Wombat
sorry I don't understand, is that fact wrong or right?
@@calengo454 It's wrong. The real etymology is described in the video we are commenting on.
great insight doesn't have to be canonical ;p
0:23 same in Polish. Today "żona" means wife, but it used to mean "woman" (and still does in other Slavic languages) - we still use "żeński" for adjectives like in "rodzaj żeński" ("feminine gender", or rather "feminine type" as we call it). The modern Polish word for woman, "kobieta", used to be an insult - "kob" is an old word for a pigpen, and "-eta" indicated a close relationship with it - so calling someone "kobieta" used to be like calling someone a dirty pig (or cow, or other farm animal like that). It only lost that pejorative meaning around 150 years ago.
Also fun fact, English queen and Polish żona come from the same PIE word.
@@grzegorzha.As does the Greek gynē, as in "gynecology"
I find it so funny that zona means wife because in Hebrew zona (זונה) means wh*re 😭😭
@@beesechurgertf2 It's pronounced differently though. "Ż" is a sound like "g" in "mirage".
@@grzegorzha. Ohh
how wonderful that the one time we decide to have spelling consistency after a sound change it just causes more confusion 🤦♀️
not really. it made inflection easier
I appreciate the extra time taken to delve into the etymology of wīfmann. You could’ve just left it at “here is the older version of the word which had an ī sound” and not explained the etymology, but that was actually the most interesting part of the video!
English? Consistency? Impossible...
Consistenly inconsistent
photograph and photographer sound completely different when pronounced but they are spelled similarly to show that one is derived from the other.
this is sort of like how in french vert is pronounced "ver", but the word is still spelled with a t to show that it is related to the feminine form verte, which is pronounced with a t.
@@Designed1 I'm pretty sure if "vert" had no "t" the feminine would be "vere". It's not "related to the feminine form", it's just how most of the feminine words are built up, so basically it's the other way round: feminine form is related to the masculine one
As a french learner, you can't predict that the feminine of "doux" would be "douce" and not "douxe". And if I apply what you said, the masculine of "douce" isn't "douc" (which has a completely different pronunciation)
Almost every language has no consistency
@@ThisIsAHandle-xz5yo on the contrary.
That backing effect of 'w' was a bit late to the party in Northern England. You still sometimes here 'water' rhyme with 'fatter', or 'warm' with 'arm'. In the fifties some folk would basically have all those wa- words un-backed: there's recordings where 'watch' rhymes with latch, 'wasp' with 'asp' etc., Not sure if anyone still speaks like that today though maybe up in the North East or perhaps in Scotland?
Definitely in Scotland
Not in the northeast, at least in my experience.
ALWAYS SCOTLAND!
…you can still rhyme “water” and “fatter?” They both end in the same sounds regardless of dialect.
@@tfan2222 definitely not.
Wif to female is Wer to male.
So a female werewolf should be called a wifwolf.
Wifwolf
Eheheheheh
A wiwoof 🥺👉👈 uwu owo
You get it
😂😂 This gave me a great giggle
Now these are the facts we need
Fun fact: in Old English, the word for "male human" was "wereman", and this is why a person that turns into a wolf when the moon is full is called a werewolf. By that logic, a female werewolf would be called a wifwolf.
that's so cool! thank you :)
Wifewolf flows a bit better to me.
No, it wasn't. This is is a myth. The Old English word for an adult male was 'wæpnedman', not 'wereman'.
@@sussurus Wer is still a real word in Old English, and it also means adult male human.
So when a wereman bites a woman does she turns into a wereman too?
Okay, but why did the change in pronunciation only happen in the singular?
so the words wouldnt just be pronounced the same, as it evolved the lasdt vowel just changed into a schwa so the first stressed vowels being different differentiated the two.
source? i made it the fuck up
Pretty sure due to umlaut, a common thing in germanic languages where vowels affect each other. The e in the -en plural ending prob influenced the i to stay the same since they're both front vowels
@@ratrick8858 this especially makes sense to me cus "men" as the plural of "man" itself is because of umlaut
@@ratrick8858 I hope it is that, As that was my original theory for the pronunciation at all, Thinking it was originally an 'o', So if that is right it'd mean I was still like half-right lol.
I LOVE your content man. I mean, I can't get enough of language knowledge, for some reason I'm just in love with it, and I'm just discovering it now, thanks to you!
Thanks so much!!
@@humanteneleven
How is such sexism a bad thing.
The most primary and common purpose of women is as wives
Also note it's not in ALL dialects. I've always used "woh-men", similar to how "woman" is pronounced.
Tangentially related: Since "wer" was the word for "male" back in the day, the term "werewolf" would technically only apply to a male creature, and a female one would be a "wifwolf." Of course, such a word is unattested except in conversations bringing this etymology up, so take that as you will.
On a further tangent, someone once suggested that a trans woman could be called a "werewif" and I thought that was adorable.
The ending state was hilariously logical
Only if trans men are "wifwere"
Stop being trans its disgusting
We need to bring back wer (let’s keep this spelling to not confuse past tense “were”). “Man” is still used to mean “person” in niche context, but I’d bring it back to mean the original sense as in “mankind”.
@@tideghost were shouldn't even be spelled with -ere anyway, it doesn't even sound like here or where
It's also worth stating that 'werewolf' if it were etymologically consistent would mean 'male wolf' not 'human-wolf'.
I don't think Wer applies to anything that isn't a human. Does it? You don't go around calling female animals "woman", do you?
@@danielantony1882 You'd as attach wyff (I think that's how it's spelled) to them, and it would indicate that they're female. In fact that's the etymology of the word woman, wyffmann is the original, and that's what it means, female human.
@@CallanElliott That spelling is not Old English, it’s Middle English. There are no derivative words related to female animals that I can find under the word “wīf” in the Wiktionary. That means it doesn’t apply to animals. It’s exclusive to humans.
@@danielantony1882 I mean Wiktionary isn't an absolute source, and I don't know the proper Old English, I just know that fact, and I communicate it with the spellings I know. Which are also the ones most people will recognise.
Nope, wer (like its Latin cognate vir) means adult male human
Short video, no bullshit, straight to the point. Nice.
In Icelandic, we have the words Víf and Ver, meaning woman and man. Both of these words you'll rarely see outside of poetry nowadays, but they are still in some use today.
That's a really interesting Etymology fact. I love your videos so much! ❤ from India
egyptians: i see, i say.
ana gay
@@orangotango9231 😭😭😭💀💀💀
Question. But then why was it only the singular word that changed pronounciation and not the plural?
Uncertain, but it might be by influence of other singular/plural pairs having “oo” sounds in the singular and “ee” sounds in the plural (tooth/teeth, foot/feet, etc) so woman/women may have had phonological influence from those
@@humantenelevenWhen the front rounded vowels collapse: 👁👄👁
Is there a term or anything interesting about dialects merging back together? I've noticed that lots of teens in the UK have started using american vocabulary like Zebras for instance becoming Zee-bra instead of the typical Zeh-bra.
Dr Geoff Lindsay has a great video on how British English is becoming more American, at least for young people!
@@humanteneleven Always happy to see content creators recommending each other, especially when it's toward people as great as Dr. Lindsay! His stuff is both approachable and really in-depth!
I believe "zee-bra" was always an alternative and might even be the older form. David Attenborough, certainly no teenager, says "zee-bra."
yeh you mentioned, some dialects had the shift in the plural as well, I personally pronounce both of them exactly the same as /'wʊm.ən/
Huh??? This is the first time hearing that "wimin" is an official thing. I always pronounce it the same as woman.
Where are you from? Theyre pronounce differently
@@isaowater SEA
I've heard both a lot and kinda use a mix of both but mostly "woh-men".
Nah, you’re weird dude.
@@isaowater Maybe India 🇮🇳, Also We All Speak Like W-O-M-Ê-N & W-O-M-Æ-N... Never With "I"...
This really confused me when I was in like 3rd grade. I thought I had to pronounce women like "wo-MEHN" 😂
Maybe because it's the British pronunciation.
@@worminaroundWhat? No it isn't.
@-SUM1- In New Zealand its pronounced as an O sound not an I sound.
Fascinating!
I've often wondered about the unusual pronunciation. Cool video!
Interestingly, the Ukrainian word for a male, *чоловік* (čolovik) formerly simply meant a human/person as well, later starting meaning a male (mainly for being masculine). More interestingly, the newly adopted word for a human, *людина* (ljudyna) etymologically meaning “a people-something” with a suffix, is feminine, a unique case for Indo-European languages. Btw “inhuman” is *нелюд* (neljud) which is masculine again
That's interesting, because человек means human/person in Russian.
@@danielantony1882 in every other Slavic language, even in Rusyn (which is basically Carpathian Ukrainian) чоловік means a human: чалавек, човек, człowiek, člověk, čovek, čovjek etc.
Yet, in any other Slavic one again, чоловік means a man too. One can arrogantly call a waiter with “čovječe!” in Croatian, but not a waitress. Also, in modern russian, the set phrase «молодой человек» a young human, means either a boyfriend or a male stranger (regardless of the age)
@@nonameuserua True.
when you try your best to be consistent but end up being inconsistent in a different way
👀👰🏻♂️
@@captainobvious8037 what does this mean
@@urlocalsimp5207 don't remember. Probably an emoji for Wifeman
This channel is pure gold. I learn a very interesting thing every day !
Also, obviously, the difference in pronunciation has been maintained in order to distinguish the plural from the singular, even if the difference originally wasn't in the first vowel
i soooo hope one day we'll have hour long video essays from you! such good videos
Interesting. :) also, i find it cute to see you always posting about this kind of thing, since i guess it means it's an enjoyed hobby of yours :)
Of course english is inconsistent and complicated, it evolved from old germanic dialects and as a german I can confirm german is inconsistent and complicated. Our languages has the same roots, no wonder
English is inconsistent and complicated because it contains words from Celtic, Germanic and Latin (via French) roots, each of these groups having totally different pronunciation rules.
As the old saying goes, "English is three languages stacked on top of each other, wearing a trenchcoat and pretending to be one."
Hey can I ask why disgust is expressed differently through different languages like in arabic you’ll say “يع" and in English you would say “Ew”?
arabic depends on the dialects.
in Algerian we say عق
I see a lot of TH-camrs pronounce "women" as "woman".
Thank you for explaining the origins and not just a phonetics.
In Spanish mujer can also be used in place of esposa/marida, just depends on the culture, I remember when I tried to use duolingo to learn german for a short period of time frau could also mean wife, and I think mann as husband too but I don’t remember, depends on the culture
In Singlish, we pronounce it as woo-men
Bruh this guy is gonna be the new math 55 teacher I swear bro
Interesting, I recall theorising a while ago that it was actually the opposite; The 'o' was the original prinunciation, And there's an 'i' in "Women" due to some form of umlaut or affectation of the following 'e', Before it got reduced to a schwa. Although I suppose I was wrong.
Woman/wimen - what harm could it do when we already have goose/geese, tooth/teeth, mouse/mice?
This is actually dialectical! I grew up pronouncing "women" like "woman" because people in my speech community pronounced it that way.
Where did you grow up?
@@efthimiossakarellos7150 Toronto
Same here. Super surprising other people in the world apparently pronounce it wimin when I've always been pronouncing it wohmen.
@efthimiossakarellos7150 Same here although English is my second language so I should have learned the normal pronunciation but it sounds so much more natural with an o sound
I say 'women' like 'woman' too. I'm in California
Makes me think, why do very few English words not have the two letter combinations "iw" and "uw?" Is it this vowel rounding thing you spoke about?
what sound do they make
is the w a v or a u backing the other vowel?
“uw” never occurred in English at any stage that you would call English. “iw” existed in OE, but merged with “ew” during the Middle English period.
I like swomen.
In portuguese in weddings the Priest says " eu vos declaro marido e mulher" "i declare you husband and women" so women can also serve as Just wife. Like "a mulher do pedro" "pedro's wife/women"
Yes because this video is talking about Portuguese and not English
@@Averaage_Commenter its Just a Fun fact
In spanish is the same "marido y mujer", where "mujer" means "woman" and "wife". It would be interesting to know if this woman-wife phenomenon happens in other languages as well, maybe outside the Proto-Indo-European descendants
@@WigantXI thought wife was esposa
And I thought it’s because when Adam first saw Eve, he said: Wow man, what are those?
It’s just a joke ok.
This is really interesting how it started vs how its used nowadays, maybe they didn't have such sexist thinking back then in some areas as like in the "default male assumption"¹ but nowadays its sadly still pretty popular... so mankind started as human but then man was male human... im confused was there another term for male human as in ___man or was it just man as human and male human the same back then too like in " "¹? Really interesting vid !
I used to think the name woman came from the words "Womb" and "Man", so person who has a womb, so woman.
I’m Canadian, and I’ve only really heard people pronounce the O with actually significant emphasis for some reason. Not sure why we do it differently, but it always sounds off when I heard people in videos and such say it with the I sound
That still does not explain why the shift from i to o only took place in the singular form and mot the plural
That's so funny. In my british english accent. I say it with an oo like book. So w/oo/men.
I don't understand why this supposed effect the w has on neighboring vowels would only manifest in the singular in this case
So they decided to re-spell it with an o to be consistent with the singular spelling?
Imagine if swim, swam, and swum all had the same spelling for the sake of consistency, but still were pronounced differently.
Also, this is pretty much unrelated to the video, but you know the pattern /CiːC/ - /CɛCt/ - /CɛCt/ that some strong verbs have, like dream - dreamt - dreamt and mean - meant - meant?
Well, I'm a non-native speaker, so I have to simply learn which verbs follow this pattern, and which don't. And it's messing with my brain, like I tend to form V2/V3 of clean /kliːn/ as cleant /klɛnt/ instead of cleaned, of heat /hiːt/ as heat /hɛt/ instead of heated, and of treat /triːt/ as treat /trɛt/ instead of treated.
Also, not that same pattern, but one day something made me think that V2 and V3 of move /muːv/ are move /moʊv/ and moven /ˈmuːvən/ respectively.
And just to clarify: I've been learning English for over ten years.
I like to make mistakes like these on purpose, like to stream - the event was streamt live; or german "gerädert", incorrectly translated as wheeled, but then make it whelt for extra spice. Also, you are using proper longness markers instead of colons. That's some attention to detail!
“Swum?” Brother that’s not a word.
@tfan2222 It may sound obscure, but it is a word. Maybe in your dialect/sociolect/whatever you say ‘swimmed’/‘swam’ (e.g ‘I have never swimmed/swam’), or you don't use that word at all, but ‘swum’ is considered the standard past participle form of ‘swim”.
Wow I never thought about this, I've always kinda pronounced the plural "women" the same as the singular "woman" with more of an O or "uh" sound instead of the i.
This answers a shower thought that has bothered me for years. Thank you for bringing a little peace into my life.
May you have nice wifewolves then.
Same Reasons why it has been called mankind not humankind in the past not because they were being sexist because they were just saying humans 0:34
yeah... because in the past the men are sexist... duh
i'm from new zealand and i pronounce it with an o, or more of a 'wooh' so when i read the title i thought it was talking about the second i sound
The history of English is so interesting❤❤
I always thought it was about symmetrical vowels
Please post more here on YT!!
such a perfect day to upload this video, happy wiffmans day!
00:57 Why then did the W affect ONLY the pronunciation of the singular form? The first part of the singular and plural were exactly the same: 'WIM'
“Women” has another front vowel in the word. “Woman” didn’t.
"So your father was a Wöman-who was he?"
Just discovered your channel 😊
P.S: You're giving Vsauce vibes 😁
I read it as wifi man first
Honestly, the question I keep asking myself, is why the pronunciation changes in the first place
And could the unchanging plural be an example of double umlaut in one word occurring?
Wait what, it is? Does this mean I've technically been mispronouncing the word this whole time?
Within the biblical languages, “wife” was literally “his woman”. Sound bad until you realize “husband” was literally “her man”. It appears from the etymology shown in this video that “wife” had a similar origin.
Female not being related to male is also crazy
Compound as a verb and compound as in a building complex are from two different roots. One is from Latin, the other is from Malay, surprisingly enough.
@@georgio101 👁
@@georgio101Both "male" and "female" are from Latin via French, but the "male" in "female" is not related to the word "male" even though the spelling makes it seem so. One is from "masculus" and the other from "femella", equivalent to modern French "mâle" and "femelle" respectively.
holy shit is that scott the woz
Now I need to see that TF2 meme but with wifmen instead of women
Interesting. When I was school my language teacher was an expert in old English and he taught us that Woman came from Wambmann - man with a womb so I assume this is now outdated?
Ok so but why did the assimilation only affect the singular
Always love to hear these
This makes me curious, was there a werman at one point, and if so, why did we stop using it?
They made it consistent with the spelling by making it inconsistent with the pronunciation.
Am I the only one that pronounces it with an o?
Also first
Where are you from?
@@GignacPL Ontario, Canada
I pronounce it "wumen" idk why he said it's pronounced "wimen"
how do you distinguish woman and women
@@A_Glad Interesting
Theres no "I" in women. And i never will be 😂
Have you noticed that in the last couple of years people have started pronouncing the singular and the plural the same way both as the singular (pronouncing “women” as “woman”). I think this might particularly be the case with GenZ. The pronunciation is morphing and I’m not sure why, but I wonder if it is the influence of parents and community members who are non-native speakers who did it know about this difference in pronunciation themselves so the kids and their friends have native American English accents yet pronounced this one word “women“ differently.
Then did what we now refer to as man gdt called "male-human" in old english? And whats the etymology of human too?
wermann
wer = male, survived in Modern English "werewolf"
human is borrowed from Latin "hūmānus" (via French "humain"), which is derived from "homō". Then "homō" is thought to be derived from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰmṓ which is a derivation of *dʰéǵʰōm (earth). So it literally means "earthling"
@@Akaykimuy Guys look, it's the person who made this video on an alt account!!!
(Seriously though, your explanation is great. So good job on that.)
In what state are you?
You pronounce it with an I, where I’m from you pronounce it woo-man.
I kept saying women to myself this entire video😂
Because some people have different accents. The only i in women for me is the second vowel. I pronounce "women" like /wʊmɪn/.
"The spelling was updated with an O."
Updating spelling to reflect pronunciation?
What a foreign concept...
Also, with 'man' and 'men' they sound different, but 'woman' and 'women' will sound the same unless you changed the o sound
I was so prepared for a diatribe on how this shows this history of sexism or something. Glad I was wrong.
Wait so what did they say before man for men, did they just not have one?
Wæpnedmann or wepman. It literally translates to "weaponed person", the weapon being the penis.
Very interesting! But you've just pushed the question off by one level. Why didn't the pronunciation of the plural change, the same way the pronunciation of the singular changed? They seem very similar.
Can always tell when a TH-camr is reading from a script when they say wo-men instead of wi-men
Me just now realizing women is pronounced with an i
There are two more quirks with wifmann. Old English had grammatical gender, and you'd expect wif and wifmann to match the actual gender of a woman, but no, wif was neuter, and wifmann was masculine (because mann was masculine). The chief words in English for female people were never feminine in Old English
So what you're telling me is that we need to bring back the spelling for wimmen
Might as well bring back wifeman for the book nerds.
Me included.
Why would people think wifmann means the mans wife? Does fireman mean the mans fire?
Me who’s been pronouncing it with an O this entire time
Pronouncing the singular and plural the same is common right? I pronounce them both with an o
Considering how I pronounce "women" with a schwa sound...
Those who say women is from wife-man or history is from his-story need to open their eyes
wow! 😊❤
y'all, get yourself a true wifeman
I'll get myself a wifewolf, thanks.
Very nice youtube, but you (youtube) know that this is s short and not a random vertical video, right?
This video was uploaded as a vertical video because when it was uploaded shorts were limited to 60 seconds
It's amazing that english have both man and human