About that question on hyponyms

[Ronald Kephart]

Bryllars wrote:

>It is not clear that "men" is generic in the same way as "Man".
>
>[...]
>
>Man is an animal. Sharon stone is a member of the class Man.
>Sharon Stone is an animal.


Agreed. But then, "dog" is certainly the generic term for Canis
familiaris, and one can say:

"That animal is a member of the class Dog."
"Dogs suckle their young."

And while you can (perhaps) say "Sharon stone is a member of the
class Man," there's no way you can say:

"Men suckle their young."

Interestingly, you can say "The dog is a mammal" with "the dog"
having a generic meaning; and you can also say "Dogs are mammals,"
with the same generic meaning. But you can't say "The man is a
mammal" or "Men are mammals" in anything like a species-generic
sense. At least, I don't think you can. It seems as if the only way
"man" can, with even the remotest plausibility, be interpreted as
generic is when it's used as a mass, rather than a count noun. As
soon as it's converted to a count noun (pluralized) or made specific
in any way (e.g. used with a or the, etc.) it becomes non-generic and
has to be interpreted as "male human being."

Of course, even then it's suspect. The prescriptive grammarians have
played so many mind-games on us with "man" and "he" and so on for so
many centuries that it's almost as if we have no native-speaker
intuition left to trust. In any case, I long ago stopped using them
"generically." I use "they" for generic third person, which is not
only consistent with my dialect of English but, in fact, was common
usage before the grammar-fascists crawled out of their holes. I use
"human beings" or "humankind" or "Homo sapiens," or sometimes "folks"
(another good Ole English word) for the whole species.

Slightly aside.... Someone mentioned that Old English had generic
Mann, which indeed it did, along with specific terms Wer (male) and
Cwene (woman, wife), all inherited from Indo-European. The generic
term pushed out specific Wer (except in "werewolf"). Even more
interestingly, on the female side Cwene shifted to prostitute, and
eventually queen, while the compound Wif-Mann (man's wife) took over
for woman. But wait, there's more: in Middle English (if I understand
correctly) woman was spelled "wumman" and women was spelt "wimman."
In other words, at that point they were still interpreting the reflex
of "wif" as the head of the compound. Then, at some point later, the
head shifted to the reflex of "mann," and they started alternating
the spelling of this part of the word even tho the pronunciation
change remained on the original head. One of my (female) students
noticed this last week, and asked "Why?"....  I didn't know what to
tell her, beyond what I have outlined here. Does anyone have a
different (or better) explanation?

Ronald Kephart
Associate Professor & Coordinator
Program in Foreign Languages
Dept. of English & Foreign Languages
University of North Florida