Word for woman or women in other languages?

Khanum is Farsi for woman, usually the matriach. Girl is Dokhtar. A younger woman is Zaen.

I'm interested in how in some languages the word for woman and wife is the same word.

Wife used to mean woman in English.

"Aurat" is definitely used in Hindi as well as Urdu. Mahila is also used as well. Lots of different words.

Japanese is mainly onna/josei.

Indonesian is wanita/istri/perempuan.

Yes, and in French you have "homme" for "man" and "mari" for husband; "garçon" for "boy" and "fils" for son.

But for females, "femme" and "fille" both do double duty, "woman/wife" and "girl/daughter".

Isn't language interesting?

This thread got me thinking, and I realised that the phrase meaning human(s) in Hebrew is literally Son(s) of Adam. But we're not in Narnia, and there's no Daughters of Eve equivalent.

I'm interested in how in some languages the word for woman and wife is the same word

In Chichewa Mkazi (woman) becomes wife by adding on mine/ his/ whatever last name so it's translation is 'woman of mine/ his or last name'.

(Though there aren't actually any his/her/he/she pronouns, it's more a 'they/ theirs' iyswim).

Mkazi - woman / wife .

(Chichewa)

I'm interested in how in some languages the word for woman and wife is the same word.

All very interesting, but much better if we can use the word in our own language that we've always used to refer to ourselves without being censured, blamed, hectored and corrected!

Oh, and the Doric for 'man' is 'manny'.

'quine' for girl, 'loon' for boy.

I love this thread. What a wonderfully diverse and knowledgeable bunch of adult human females you lot are!

There are several signs in British Sign Language for woman, including one depicting the shape of a breast. No gendered pronouns though, just pronominal pointing. How IS a girl to get validation??

'Wifie' in Doric (North East Scots).

The word woman is part of the basic vocabulary that learners of English as a foreign or second language are taught in every beginner's course. So even those with a rudimentary knowledge of English typically know the word.

I did much more than beginner's English. I got a degree in English, majoring in literature and linguistics, and yet I did not learn the English word for the neck of the womb until I was pregnant and the midwives, the info leaflets and all those pregnancy books were mentioning it. Until then I thought cervical referred to the upper spine.

According to research carried out by various charities focusing on cervical cancer, nearly half of all women in the UK do not know what a cervix is and that they have one. Which is why health campaigns aimed at women must worry about using words women from all backgrounds can understand long before they should worry about using words that upset less than one percent of their target audience.

There are established procedures for doing both, of course. So you can tell the next smartarse that the most effective and successful approach to the sensitivities of females who identify as trans is to target a health campaign specifically at them that uses the appropriate terms for this specific group of patients in addition to health campaigns targeting the vast majority of women using terms commonly understood by all.

Of course, the ultimate aim of forcing the use of people with a cervix is not inclusion but the disruption of our understanding of female people as a sex class.

Mahila in Bengali and Nepalese

Žena in Serbo Croat. Also means “wife”.

Japanese kanji for mother (I presume taken from the pictogram?) is a woman with breasts

How transphobic

In Abenaki-Penobscot (a Native American language) woman is p'henem.

In Cherokee, woman is agehya.

DH learned Krio when he went to Sierra Leone, woman is "ooman", but girl is "titi" (man and boy are the same as in English).

In West African Pidgin, left hand is woman hand, right hand is man hand.

Sorry, pressed post too soon.

Woman and man actually derived from the same compound construction.

Originally these were

wifman and werman

With the components being
wif for female
wer for male
and
man for human or people

Back then, man did not mean man as it does today, but referred to human beings in general. However, the Norman invasion brought about a change in the word man, eventually evolving to mean both man and human with werman falling into disuse and wifman evolving into wife and woman.

Swedish is kvinna; Danish is kvinde.

Both very similar to Norwegian kvinne.

Latvian is sieviete, Lithuanian is moteris, and Estonian is just Finnish with a funny accent....naine instead of nainen. (Well, the Finns say that; the Estonians say Finnish is just a dialect.)

There seem to be a few in Japanese:

savvytokyo.com/many-ways-say-woman-japanese/

Japanese kanji for mother (I presume taken from the pictogram?) is a woman with breasts.

Kvinde in Danish, we have the livmoder (life mother here too).

The Proto-Germanic word is wambo and German today still has a related word, Wampe, which has negative connotations and is used to refer to a fat belly, usually that of a man, or in a less negative way it's a colloquial term for stomach.

'meri' in Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea), which is a creole language I always loved.

married woman - meri marit
women’s business - samting bilong ol meri
womb - bilum bilong pikinini [bilum is a bag]