Our increasing mistake.

[Journeyman H. [UK]]

There is 1 big thing that's making my mind itch...
This one time, during college, we cannot use the word "Foreman" anymore, due to it being seen as "sexist", they change things such as foreman to "Foreperson". My tutor (Who happens to be female) got told by the observers that she can't use foreman anymore, and it's been bugging me ever since.

I then became curious to why "man" was used at the end of each sentence? (Policeman, Foreman, Businessman, etc)
The answer did turn out to be simple; Our increasing errors we are making in our language.

I thought I'd share this and have your thoughts...
To start off, language evolves, we know that. Our language has evolved from other languages we are exposed to, we translate every language constantly and we add new words to our dictionary, we are bound to make major mistakes when translating in the long run.


If we actually listen to how we say man and -man you'll pronounce it differently.

When we speak of a male, we strongly pronounce the 'a' more.
But when we speak of someone such as a foreman, notice how you say "man" but don't actually pronounce the a as strongly as we do for man.

I noticed that the word "man" we use for the end of words, such as human, woman, etc is actually a suffix called "-man"
So, essentially, the word -man translates into person, however suffixes appeared to exist in more modern languages, so evolving old languages to new ones eventually caused errors which we witness today.

My theory was that some letters might have been dropped out to be replaced with suffixes
The alphabet we dropped out is the letter '?'

When we speak of -man, it should be m?n if we are going to directly pronounce it.

I believe the introduction of suffixes were made to specify what we are saying towards people, rather than making a library of alphabetical words, we use suffixes as a convenient replacement.

You can notice how the word "Woman", "Human" also used the -man pronounciation? If we were to be politically correct as the world demands us, wouldn't you might as well call a Woman a "Woperson"? Or a Human a "Huperson"?

This does intrigue me a lot to find out more, but alas, my tracks of learning anything more is somewhat dead in it's tracks, seeing as language dates back so far, but it still interests me none the less.

Seeing as the English language is so diverse and with our rapid means of communication, we are rapidly losing the ability to understand our potential errors in the language.
Being politically correct about how we speak does nothing but derail us, they should be concerned how our language has evolved and how it's evolving then finding ways to fix it or make it convenient.

But I will leave a very important question;
Should we fix our ever increasing breaking language? (The English language)

[Mr Jive]

Probably, or not, the idea of trying to fix the language seems unnecessary as I doubt it will catch on, in a sense it would have to evolve to a fixed state and as we know evolution of any kind is a slow process. I suppose our language will either fix its self overtime or will simply evolve further into something else. I mean eventually the English language will be so different in a sense that the English language of say 100 - 200 years ago will seem like more than just a different dialect.

But yes the English language is very strange and confusing. For example a vast majority of words often have double or even multiple meanings. Like as a simple example right. Right can be used to describe turning or when something is correct, and yet this is not a logical pattern. Left and wrong do not mean the same thing which if it were logical they should shouldn't they? Also I remember reading recently that many words have meanings that can be a juxtaposition to itself. I can't remember the example but in some cases you could use the same word twice in a sentence and each time it was used it would mean the complete opposite thing. It makes me surprised that so many people have managed to learn such an odd language.

Interesting topic, it seems as if the English language is almost like a living thing that is constantly being changed by us and yet is somehow out of our control.

[Journeyman H. [UK]]

I just realised that the forums can't be able to use a specific alphabet, but you can easily see that letter by going on a dictionary, wiki, etc.


Foreman with that peculiar alphabetical letter
You'll find that peculiar e shape that has been rotated 180 degrees.

The thing is, in order for us to steer ourselves out of this mess we got into is to find a way to be educated.
What influences us the most in how we behave, communicate, etc? Education, ofcourse.

We (Everyone) should begin to steer ourselves out of that problem, coupled with the boring people who want to make everything politically correct to help influence us to reuse such a word in the alphabet.

But obviously not everyone would learn it instantly by the next day, and there'd be confusion, but I find that a much more logical solution, rather than changing -man into person.
Otherwise, rather than using -man as a suffix, you might as well call a woman a woperson or us as a collective as a huperson.

But then that means we have technically damaged our language.
So you'd have to call it "Female person" or "Wise person" in order to flow with our language properly.

[Mr Jive]

Yeah I think there is a common misconception that man at the end of words is because of male superiority/sexism but of course it isn't. Like you said it would be a shame if they were to remove man as a prefix because none likes change :C

Also I wonder why we removed characters like the upside down e from our alphabet, it sort of makes everything more confusing and less clear. Many other languages around Europe have kept varied letters that are used for varied pronunciation so as to avoid confusion.

[Journeyman H. [UK]]

Because our language (I'll assume) is based solely on how we string words up to create a whole new meaning, so the need for that particular letter was not needed or was deemed unneeded, and things such as -man replaced the original word, therefore we naturally eliminated the need for the alphabet, because our language bases itself on how we place our words in the sentence.

But unfortunately, it seems that the people who do this politcal correctness aren't looking into the history of how our language evolved, they are most likely socially pressured into being blind do-gooders, and probably to get a promotion and a pat on the back for "Well done you made the world equal".

We still use the very old alphabets, but that's if you were to spell out it's exact pronunciation.

I should ask my tutor about it. Ask for her thoughts.

[Somone77]

As usual disclaimer: I didn't read the thread and am posting my opinion without further information other than the OP.
I should also note that I'm not intentionally attacking religion but I will not tip-toe around it as if it deserves special treatment.

Again, if you know me, I find entertainment in religious contradictions and hypocrisy and this subject is no exception. Lets just start with a few of the most notable:

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.

Oh, and let's not forget the ever-loving Qur'an

Quran Dawood p. 83, 4:34: "Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and forsake them in beds apart, and beat them."

(odd, I'm not able to put two quotes into this post, note for future me to look into that.)

Can't you just feel the love?

The problem with this is not their current interpretations in which these are seen as morally wrong and most religious individuals ignore them (with the excuse that those were "old times") but I'm not going to get into that.
What I'm saying is that the world has religious roots in every single culture. These old books share the atrocities contained within them to the world at large conveying a point that it's clearly okay to degrade, rape and murder women.

Now, where am I going to relate this to the English translation to political correctness? I don't know, I don't think ahead while I type. However personally I've always hated the whole "political correctness" thing. Why is speaking about retarded kids a "hushed" thing? I don't understand. They think "retard" is derogatory, but it's not. Retard, by definition is "Delay or hold back in terms of progress, development, or accomplishment." That's not derogatory, it's accurately defined. If anything, I find "slow" when describing retarded individuals to be more annoying seeing as slow very shallowly describes a person with any sort of mental disabilities.

To answer the question you raised in the OP; No, fuck no. Are we going to change hundreds of years of literature and remove the word "nigger"? No, but that's not politically correct either. How do you think it could possibly work, changing hundreds of words in the English language? Is the president just going to show up on a required broadcast for an hour and list all the words we're no longer aloud to say and now have to amend -person to all words that were one -man? No, it's an absurd idea and I will make sure, through every day if this were to even catch on through word of mouth, every time someone says "woperson" or "huperson" I would interject and say at them, "WOMAN" or "HUMAN" because that's the word. There's no such word that has the suffix "person" and there won't be.

Also, one more touch on feminism and rights; if a woman wants equal rights, she's going to split the god damn dinner bill with me. You can't pick and choose when equality applies to you. Chivalry or Equality, pick one. (I'd like to point out that I'm a chivalrous person. I don't hold woman on a lower bar than myself. I'm speaking strictly objective, as I do in all my posts, even if it sometimes gets me in trouble.)

[Mr Jive]

This is why (on the religious note) humanity is going through a transition period where we are removing religious moralities from political viewpoints.

But on a more relevant note I don't think we should fix the prefix -man into person because from their double meanings they mean the same thing. Man and person both come from the latin Homo as in Homosapien, it is simply another strange thing in the English language where many words can all mean the same thing. But language will still end up changing, perhaps for the better or more likely into something even more confusing and broken. Who knows, only time can tell

Also on your part about political correctness; there is a charity in England called scope with the intentions of helping people with a certain kind of physical disability. The charity used to be called the spastics society, because people suffering would suffer from spas attacks in the muscles. But other time the word spastic, and more to the point spas, became derogatory and so the company had to change their name to avoid offending people. Strange the way language works.

[Statua]

In english technical communications, i learned all about this bs.  Its a real pain cause every report i had to chance chairman to chairperson or mailman to mailperson and it just sounded retarded. Im all in for womens rights but this is too far.

[Journeyman H. [UK]]

The point of this is asking if we should fix this; as in, people who are using political correctness to nitpick at tiny words, such as the foreman example I've said, should not be changing our words at all, because replacing words into -person is literally destructive to our language and can lead to major errors.

I just did an observation on how we pronounce the word and when we pronounce it based on where we place such a word.
That's why I assumed that the word -man must be a suffix (and can be a prefix as well.).

If I were to say "Fore man". I am addressing specifically to a male.
If I were to say "Fore woman". I am addressing specifcally to a female.
But if I were to say "Foreman", then I am addressing it as a collective of people in that field.

Our language is filled with special rules and meanings that, if separated, means different, but if put together creates a whole new meaning.

That's the problem though with words such as "Retarded" or "Negro", because they specifically define who/what someone/something is.

The reason words such as "Retard" was discouraged was simply because people used it as a derogatory term, which therefore people found it offensive which then became a controversial word.
But the amusing part of it is that when we are accepted to use "Retard" as a technical term for slowing. Such as; Fire Retardant.

Moving onto the word "Negro", we can't use that to define a black person, but if you want to define someone such as a white person, or a mexican, you would call them Caucasian, or Hispanic, etc.

That's the problem, we can address a black person as a black person, but we can't address an Asian for a yellow person.
But yeah our political correctness and lack of education has made a lot of individuals who act as do-gooders for society a bit brain dead.

However I did find an error.
When we say "Mankind" we are using a prefix but pronouncing the a strongly, we can easily assume that either there are certain rules in the language that allows "Mankind" to mean - People with similar characteristics, but then again the real word is Humankind, "Mankind" was most likely shortened down, whether intentionally showing male superiority or whether it was convenience, I have no reason to make a real answer to that.

I can go so far in depth on how out of control on how it goes. I can go as far as words such as "Manager", simply because it uses the word "man" before the word.


I could also say is that we are also placing technical language into communicational language, which therefore can lead to further misinterpretations.
Therefore it does demand a major wakeup call, we really need the education system to teach young people the differences between communicational and technical language.
We also need to have history on how the language is formed, as opposed to using the stance of "Read English books, you'll learn English" stance that the majority of the education system seems to be using today. Whilst we do speak of great figures that helped modernise our language (William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, etc.), it does not give us insight on why these words formed up as it is, which we as people should really need.




But yeah, I fully support equal rights for everyone, but it's when these supposed "Equal rights" go too far and we forget the actual meaning of some things and then replace them just to make the other do-gooders happy, we are essentially placing a plaster over the word, totally disregarding the history of such a word and it's true meaning, and it's absolutely appalling to find that they fail to notice how we pronounce each word.


Statua I agree with you, I feel like a fucking idiot when I do my assignments.

I unknowingly finish a 4-5 page assignment and I noticed that I added "-man" to the end of each word of profession, I spent a fair bit of time correcting it to "Person", because it was not just foreman I had, I included words such as draughtsman, businessman, etc.