Shon Faye thinks the words "girl", "woman" and "she" were "invented" in the 13th century

[VickyEadie]

www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/9ba1l5/this_tumblr_post_that_claims_words_like_girl_and/

And there were no languages other than English, presumably.

I remember something about man being the word for person, with werman and wifman the male and female types. However language evolved, there's no doubt that there were separate words to describe the male and female sexes.

I think a really nice way of getting a sense of Old English is finding a version of a work which has the OE in one side and the modern English translation on the other.

I agree. I once turned the page in my parallel translation of Beowulf and picked up the old English instead of the translation. Suffice it to say the English translatio was much less bawdy.

Did all those people thousands of years ago making the sculptures of huge-breasted, big-arsed fertility goddesses really not have a name for what they were predicting

An Israeli Boy Thought He Found a Pebble. Turns Out, It’s an 11,000-year-old Fertility Figurine

The Neolithic-era stone figure, which the boy put in a box at home, was recently discovered two years later by his mother, who turned it over to archaeologists

"These figurines were a symbol of human fertility and there are researchers who view them as the 'mother goddess.

www.haaretz.com/israel-news/8-year-old-israeli-boy-finds-11-000-year-old-fertility-figurine-1.6432552

So many wonderful matriarchal cultures which survived for centuries.

Oh I'd love to see Shon take on the Style & Beauty lot with that handbag.

FWR are pussycats compared to S&B. Those women are harsh.

Alice

Loving 'malodorous masses'

Perhaps they don’t realise S&B is there? Surely they would be all over it if they did?

It's a mystery how anyone knew that the figure that came to exact revenge for the death of Grendell was Grendell's "modor", given that apparently we were all in a flux about knowing who was male and who was female in Ye Olden Days

That picture - there's only ever one word that comes to mind when I see SF... Petulant

Ooh I do like all this etymology.

I am enjoying nosing through that english - old norse dictionary. It's so interesting which words have many versions, which have double meanings. I note that there is a word for the verb foster (fóstra), and the same word means foster-mother (rather depersonalising). Then foster son (fóstra), foster father (also fóstra), and foster brother (fóstbróðir). No word for foster sister or daughter though. I can't help but wonder if there's a reason those haven't been recorded.

I'd very like to see what the kvenna on Kvennváðir&Fegrð think of that hǫnd-belgr**.

*women, wives
**women's clothing and beauty

• **hand-bag

Balls (or bqllr as Anlaf might have said in 941)

foster son and father are fóstri, foster mother and "to foster" are fóstra

Anlaf - I wonder if it's because of the practice of sending away one's son to a relative to be looked after (certainly what the nobility did in the high Middle Ages, not sure if the practice was going in AS times). As in one's foster son is someone that one is looking after for their parents, not because their parents can't have them but as part of their wider upbringing and education? And those children are almost always male?

The Romans were big on adopting sons weren't they, can't remember hearing they bothered to do the same with girls.

Very interesting!

I got lost in a dictionary of Old High German because of this thread yesterday. I bet Shon Faye thinks we are all waluwib (cruel women).

I also expect girls that were unable to be looked after by their family were sent into service rather than fostered.

Igneo

Aye, Shon would have us as alheimskr húsfreyjur (completely foolish housewifes).

my new bookmark

Erm. Who would early Christians have blamed for eating the 'fruit of knowledge' and corrupting humanity then? Some not-so-pretty-boy in crap makeup?

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

Whoever wrote the Book of Genesis had words for male and female.

Yes anlaf silly housewifes only interested in wībgiwāti and wībesskuoh
I love this, I'll be integrating lots of Old High German words into my speech. I'm framchamo (someone who is not living at home) from now on, not foreign.

I can see a secret MN vocab primer developing so we can discuss this unrihtwis unraed without the intervention of any hearmscaƿas.

Genesis not only uses distinct words for male and female, but also for man, woman, wife, husband, mother, father, son and daughter.

The earliest written documents of Genesis are the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are over 2000y old, and are likely to be copies of even older documents. They are written in the languages of that era, at least one of which has been in continuous use ever since, and has changed so little over the millennia that modern Hebrew speakers still use the same words for male, female, man, woman, wife, husband, mother, father, son and daughter.

Alice - I've thought for a while that women, and lesbians (of the vulva preferring variety) would have to develop a language of their own akin to Polari - maybe Anglo Saxon could be it.

Though it might have to be modified with other words - "cunt" for example is the Anglo Saxon word and is in such wide usage it's no use for discussing sexual preferences on the down-low. Perhaps we could use the proto-Germanic "kattuz".

So when online dating, indicate a preference by saying you like "eten triewe kattuz".

I love this thread.

Igneococcus

Of course, but that was in Hebrew and translated into Greek and Latin. Everyone knows that nothing counts until it's in English...

Nobody Found my genesis extract though and we have:
ƿa geseah ƿaet wif ƿaet ƿaet treow waes god to etann... and sealde hire were: he aet ƿa.
Definitely still blaming the wife!

I see my 18 year old self scribbled a note on Dream of the Rood - "colours not used on OE, but spectrum of light". Presumably, colour didn't exist either. Poor AS children not knowing their innate gender by pink preference.

Fermats

I love it!