Man is sexless, says William Safire. So why am I not shocked or insulted? Because he is absolutely right, etymologically speaking. Let’s put the words in context. In How Not To Write: The Essential Misrules of Grammar, a slim little paperback, he writes:
Etymologists know that the word man, going back to the Sanskrit manus, means “human being” and is sexless. Although man and woman are differentiated in English, the universal meaning of man to encompass both sexes remains. Why accept a fiat from anti-sexism headquarters to change it now?
Safire is deriding the tendency to replace a word like “chairman” with “chairperson”. The “man” in this case can be a woman too, he argues, going back to the root of the word.
Personally, I would rather not call a woman a chairman. But he is right. Manus -- or manush (pronounced mah-noosh) as we say in Bengali -- means a human being.
I was amazed. I am a Bengali myself and yet it had never occurred to me that the English “man” and the Bengali manush were, in any way, related.
Later, I looked up the Concise Oxford Dictonary, which said “man” comes from the Sanskrit manu.I didn’t know that word, but Safire’s manus immediately made me think of the Bengali manush.
And I was struck by how people mutate, too, like any other species.
No one will mistake a Bengali or any other Indian with an Englishman or a German, and yet many of the words we use come from the same stock. We speak what scholars call the Indo-European languages, which also include Greek, Latin, Persian, Gaelic and Slavic among others. I don’t understand any of those languages; yet they all have the same roots.
I can imagine how we changed. There were intermarriages; foreigners went native. The Aryans in India became different from those in Persia, as did the Greeks from the Latins.
We are still changing. We Bengalis in India speak the same language as the Bangladeshis; yet our accents are different, and so are some of the words we use. Pakistan was once part of India. Now, on the Arts and Letters website, Pakistan's Dawn newspaper is grouped with Al Jazeera, Tehran Times and other publications from the Middle East.
Changes are taking place elsewhere too. Think of the growing Hispanic and Asian populations in America -- and the former British Conservative leader, Michael Howard. His father was a Romanian shopkeeper who changed his name from Hecht to Howard. And he himself, an immigrant’s son, is British to the core.
