Word for woman or women in other languages?

[Cailleach1]

Just that. I'd love to see the many varied words for adult homo sapiens of the female sex around the world? Many words, but only having one specific meaning.

Bean (sounds like 'ban' in English) means woman and Mná (sounds like meh-naw in English) means women in Irish.

Kobieta/ Kobiety in Polish.

Words for woman:

Emakume - in Basque
Maouez - in Breton
Dona - in Catalan

@CharlieParley

Interestingly, Sorbian knows a dual form in addition to the usual singular and plural ones.

I should add to the above that the second term, žeńska, which is more commonly used, also has a second meaning of "wife".
While the equivalent word for man means either human or man or husband.

Funny how many languages have done this, framing males as the default human.

Is there a language where the word for woman is also the generic term for human?

In Finnish 'nainen' derives from the verb 'naida' which means to marry (also means to fuck) so I guess woman is what you marry. Man is mies which is just man or husband, so man is default and woman is just what the man marries.

Kadin in Turkish, or Avrat in eastern Turkic dialects. Similar to the Urdu and Hindi words...

I was thinking about this the other day in relation to the "people with a cervix" debate. Someone on Twitter was explaining this wouldn't be helpful for people with little English as they wouldn't know what a cervix was.

Some smart-arsed TRA replied that if they had little English, they wouldn't know the word "woman" either. So I started counting up how many languages I could say "woman" or at least "lady" in - I managed mujer (Spanish), femme (French), Frau (German), donna (Italian) and Vrouw (Dutch) just off the top of my head, even though I forgot Irish, and I only really speak two of those languages.

On the other hand, I've no idea of the word for "cervix" in any of them, even in the language I spoke from childhood...

In Arabic:
امرأة pronounced Imra’a or نساء pronounced niseh’ (as close as I can transliterate them!)

wanita in Malay

(man is lelaki)

and Welsh is an interesting one - lots of regional variants - dynes (a man is dyn), but there is also merch, menyw and gwraig (but that really means wife to me)

Lass in Yorkshire

Zhinka in Ukrainian

Quine is girl or young woman in Doric (northeast Scotland- Aberdeenshire, Kincardineshire, Morayshire, Banffshire)

Agehya in Cherokee

@user1493242132

Aurat in Hindi

Apparently it is Urdu. Stree is Hindi. as confirmed by my Indian friend.

ahagwearsapointybonnet - it's interesting because I read somewhere recently that the word 'woman' comes from the word 'man' plus the word 'womb'. Womb + man = woman.

So no need for the cervix to be in the frame - it's simpler than that.

Nowadays, "Frau" is used in German for females when they are being referred to (i.e. Frau SoandSo) unless someone really old still makes the distinction between Miss and Mrs. Then it is either Fräulein (Miss, unmarried) or Frau (Mrs, married). But that distinction has fallen by the wayside and Fräulein is barely used.

Kvinna in Swedish.

Also nice is that the direct translation of the Swedish word for 'womb' -livmoder- is 'life mother'.

Žena is Slovak
This thread is very interesting, I love the point a previous poster made about knowing the word woman in many languages but not knowing the word cervix in any.
Off the top of my head I could count six languages I know how to say woman in.

@AdultHumanFemale

Kvinna in Swedish.

Also nice is that the direct translation of the Swedish word for 'womb' -livmoder- is 'life mother'.

In German it's a compound word made out of gebären (giving birth) and Mutter (mother) = Gebärmutter

The cervix is called the neck of the womb = Gebärmutterhals. Cervical cancer is Cancer of the neck of the womb = Gebärmutterhalskrebs.

'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]

@shelvira

ahagwearsapointybonnet - it's interesting because I read somewhere recently that the word 'woman' comes from the word 'man' plus the word 'womb'. Womb + man = woman.

So no need for the cervix to be in the frame - it's simpler than that.

Rather glad to tell you that this isn't correct. The history of the word womb shows that it is derived from a root word referring to the belly.

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.

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

@Cailleach1

Just that. I'd love to see the many varied words for adult homo sapiens of the female sex around the world? Many words, but only having one specific meaning.

Bean (sounds like 'ban' in English) means woman and Mná (sounds like meh-naw in English) means women in Irish.

Those weirdos in the north pronounce mná as mrá though

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.

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.)

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.

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