From what I’ve read on this site and elsewhere, the root “man” was originally sex-neutral; the sex-specific terms were “wifman” (which later became “woman”) and either “werman” or “wepman”. The male-specific prefix has long been lost in this context, but does it survive anywhere else? I.e., what would a modern reconstruction of the word “werman” or “wepman” look like?
Learn English – Does the archaic prefix wer/wep have modern descendants
etymologygrammatical-genderhistorical-change
Related Solutions
How did the archaic 'villein' transform into villain?
This is the process of semantic change called degeneration or pejoration:
- Historical Linguistics. semantic change in a word to a lower, less approved, or less respectable meaning.
Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Dictionary
The entry for villain confirms this degeneration process:
c. 1300 (late 12c. as a surname), "base or low-born rustic,"
from Anglo-French and Old French vilain "peasant, farmer, commoner, churl, yokel" (12c.),
from Medieval Latin villanus "farmhand,"
from Latin villa "country house, farm" (see villa).
The most important phases of the sense development of this word may be summed up as follows: 'inhabitant of a farm; peasant; churl, boor; clown; miser; knave, scoundrel.'
Today both Fr. vilain and Eng. villain are used only in a pejorative sense. [Klein]
Another example of pejoration is knave:
"boy" → "servant" → "deceitful or despicable man"
Often words associated with things that are lower on the subjective "nobility scale" deteriorate into more and more ignoble meanings. The feudal tenants were essentially slaves, and this word, which was associated with them, became increasingly ignoble over time, until it reached evil criminal.
Villain is a person associated with the villa in the same way as chaplain or captain are a person associated with the cap. Starting at this origin yields a reasonable degeneration:
villain: farmer → peasant → clown → miser → crook → anti-hero
Perhaps the currently popular tenets of socialism have begun to strike back on behalf of the peasants by labeling the rich and powerful as the villain. That would be a reasonable connotation, but it has not necessarily "flipped" the definition.
Our generation has experienced this process of degeneration recently in the expression jones:
noun
A fixation on or compulsive desire for someone or something, typically a drug; an addiction:
a two-year amphetamine jones verb[NO OBJECT] (jones on/for)
Have a fixation on; be addicted to:
Palmer was jonesing for some coke againOrigin
1960s: said to come from Jones Alley, in Manhattan, associated with drug addicts.
Jones Alley is a small dead end street in the middle of NoHo, a curently upscale neighborhood in Manhattan. The neighborhood flourished from its establishment in the 1820s until its first peak in the 1910s, then it declined through the 1960s. At the neighborhood's nadir, Jones Alley was supposedly a convenient lair for drug dealers, and one of the many nicknames of heroin was jones:
surname, literally "John's (child);" see John.
Phrase keep up with the Joneses (1913, American English) is from the title of a comic strip by Arthur R. Momand.
The slang sense "intense desire, addiction" (1968) probably arose from earlier use of Jones as a synonym for "heroin," presumably from the proper name, but the connection, if any, is obscure. Related: Jonesing.Etymonline.com
Although the details of this etymology are not 100% certain, our relatively recent cultural experience with addiction can help us visualize the linguistic process of pejoration toward the end of the word's development:
jones: John's (child) → surname → street name → nickname for heroin → addiction
You are looking for a practical answer, not a theoretical one: politically correct terms that are acceptable in practice. So I looked for competing terms that are actually being adopted in the wild.
According to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, the proposed replacement for woman that shows evidence of adoption in literature is womyn. It is now used about one time in five thousand in place of woman.
The proposed replacement for the plural form women that shows evidence of adoption is wimmin. It is now used about one time in ten thousand in place of women.
These frequencies are very small, but have been trending upward since around 1975. They are evidence that these are the primary competing terms, but not evidence of widespread acceptance in literature.
Unlike womyn/wimmen, there is not yet a competing term for female. The term *fele has been proposed satirically, but no effort has been made to promote its actual use and there is no evidence in literature that it is gaining acceptance.
Best Answer
The Old English word wer survived into Middle English as "were" in both the senses of "male human" and "husband". Wer(e) is ultimately cognate not only with similar words in other Germanic languages but also with Latin "vir". The word wapman similarly survived into Middle English, meaning a male human being. Old English wǽpnman was from wǽpn meaning "weapon", but according to the OED, it was used here not in the sense of "weapon" but in the sense of "penis".
FumbleFingers rightly mentions werewolf, which is thought to derive from wer, and since at least the 19th century writers have occasionally coined words such as wer-bear and werecalf, though it's not clear that they have had the word wer or any knowledge of etymology in mind when doing so. The OED (in an entry not fully updated since 1926) casts doubt on the etymology:
However, more recent etymologies from Oxford University Press sound a less sceptical note: ODO (echoing the Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology) says "the first element has usually been identified with Old English wer ‘man’". Other dictionaries such as AHD and Collins accept the "wer" etymology - as does M-W, adding in a note that "while some doubts about the word’s etymology still remain", "wer" is the most likely origin.
The word wergild or wergeld also survives. According to the OED, it means:
Here's a citation from 1902:
Between the 17th and 19th centuries, there are also examples of were or wer being used as an abbreviated name for wergeld: