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Human is a loanword of Middle English from Old French humain, ultimately from Latin hūmānus, the adjectival form of homō ('man' – in the sense of humanity). [14] The native English term man can refer to the species generally (a synonym for humanity) as well as to human males. It may also refer to individuals of either sex. [15]
The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann-"person") and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age. In traditional usage, man (without an article) itself refers to the species or to humanity (mankind) as a whole. The Germanic word developed into Old English mann. In Old English, the word ...
The Old English form primarily meant "person" or "human being" and referred to men, women, and children alike. The Old English word for "man" as distinct from "wif"/"woman" or "child" was wer. Mann only came to mean "man" in Middle English, replacing wer, which survives today only in the compounds "werewolf" (from Old English werwulf, literally ...
The words in brackets are implied in the Old English by noun case and the bold words in brackets are explanations of words that have slightly different meanings in a modern context. Notice how what is used by the poet where a word like lo or behold would be expected.
The Chinese character used in East Asian languages is 人, originating as a pictogram of a human being. The reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation of the Chinese word is /ni[ŋ]/. [7] A Proto-Sino-Tibetan r-mi(j)-n gives rise to Old Chinese /*miŋ/, modern Chinese 民 mín ' people ' and to Tibetan མི mi ' person, human being '.
The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...
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Modern English has no Germanic words for 'animal' in the general sense of 'non-human being'. Old English dēor, gesceaft, gesceap, nēat and iht were all eclipsed by 'animal', 'beast', 'creature' and 'critter'. ācweorna: squirrel. Displaced by Anglo-Norman esquirel and Old French escurel, from Vulgar Latin scuriolus, diminutive of scurius ...