I've seen some times the claim that in the past "man" was a non-gendered word, with "wifman" referring to female individuals and "wereman" referring to male individuals. I've found some indications that "wifman" was either a predecessor or a complement to "woman", and even the root for the current "wife". I've failed to find solid information regarding "man" being a truly neutral word (and not just a masculine word applied to both female and male individuals) and "wereman" or any alternative being the default word for male individuals.
So, was "man" a non-gendered word in the English language or its predecessors at some point, with different words derived from it (as woman is today) to refer to both male and female individuals?
Note: My main language is entirely gendered, and we have no way to address someone in a gender-neutral way that is common usage. If anything comes across as rude, please say so and I'll correct it. I understand this may be a sensitive topic.
Best Answer
Man in Old English could be either gendered or non-gendered. We inherited that ambiguity.
In Old English, man referred to both an adult male and a human being of either sex. Here is Stephen A. Barney in Word-Hoard: An Introduction to Old English Vocabulary, entry 8:
Compounds include an early version of mankind, man-cynn. So what we have is a word that can refer to either adult males or human beings. Furthermore, it was sometimes hard to distinguish these uses. While the context makes telling them apart easily enough in this usage OED:
Can you tell which man is meant in the next two uses? Testicles makes the second men obvious. The first manne (referring to men being hanged for thievery) is rather harder, unless you believe that only men could be hanged for thievery.
Or how about the following usage? In the Old English Homilies, did Jesus became both man (an adult male) or man (a human being) for us? Either fits.
Also, to the extent we've been discussing a word in a language that still had grammatical gender, man in Old English is masculine. While grammatical gender should not be confused with biological gender (see Latin poeta, agricola, incola, nauta, all appear feminine in form but function masculine when modified by adjectives and most likely refer to men), grammatical gender doesn't help us distinguish semantically gender-neutral cases here.
So it would oversimplify to calling this usage gender-neutral OR strictly gendered, since the reading as adult male and the reading as human being may lead to ambiguity. Furthermore, such ambiguity doesn't exist for any word that refers to women - wif, bryd, faemne, cwene, and other words for women do not enjoy double-status as words referring to humans in general. Thus, while Old English man could be used to refer to human beings (including individual women), man (and the adult male it sometimes refers to) possesses a dual quality that woman and other female terms lack.