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.

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).

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

How transphobic

Žena in Serbo Croat. Also means “wife”.

Mahila in Bengali and Nepalese

@ahagwearsapointybonnet

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...

Smartarse indeed.

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.

'Wifie' in Doric (North East Scots).

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??

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

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

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!

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

Mkazi - woman / wife .

(Chichewa)

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).

@IwishNothingButTheBestForYou2

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

In Hebrew isha is both woman and wife, but the word for husband is baal, meaning master.

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.

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?

"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.

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.

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