you who swallowed a falling star

As a linguist, I find myself asking: to what extent is language responsible for this? The word woman, after all, visually looks like a derivative form of man, in the same way female does of male.

Looking into the origins and usage of the words we commonly use to express gender can be pretty revealing.

Let’s begin with the word man. Man comes from the Old English (the form of English used roughly between the 5th and 12th centuries) word man or mann, which meant ‘human being, person.’ The sense of ‘adult male’ came much later on, appearing only around 11th century. Before then, Old English had used the term wer for an adult male human and wif for an adult female human. For reasons unknown, wer began to disappear in the late 13th century and was replaced by man (though it can still be found in some modern English words like werewolf).

Man thus became a term that amalgamated the meanings ‘human being’ and ‘adult male.’ Meanwhile, the compound of wif (‘female’) and man (‘human being’) gave rise to the current word woman. (Wif on its own gave rise to the word wife, in the sense of ‘female spouse’; its original Old English meaning of ‘female’ is preserved in terms like midwife, old wives’ tale, etc).Languages like French and Italian also have words for men that encompass both the meanings ‘human being’ and ‘adult male’ (homme, uomo), whereas the words for women exclusively refer to the adult female (femme, donna).

Meanwhile, the word female, which derived from the Old French femelle (a word that had no relation to the Middle French word masle which gave us male) seems to have been respelled in the 14th century so that it more closely reflected the spelling of male.

So historically, women (since the Middle Ages, anyway) have been the linguistically marked gender: a woman is not simply a human being, but, crucially, a non-male human being.