Mastodawn

Connor Moran Dec 19, 2022

The word man originally was gender-neutral. Wer was used for male-gendered men and Wif for female. Wif persisted as "wife" and wifman->woman. The wer was dropped in the 10th century or so and man just came to take over.

Which is fun because that wer is the same as werewolf, so there also used to be weremen

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my friends call me 5

@ConnorMoran

so a woman werewolf is a wifwolf? 🤩

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John Dumas Dec 19, 2022

@sj5 @ConnorMoran More likely a wifwilf (or we can dress it up with y’s and make it a wifwylf).
Old English wulf is most likely a he-wolf (masculine noun), since Beowulf has at 1506a seo brim-wylf, calling Grendel’s mother “the sea wolf,” grammatically feminine, though it seems there’s an attested form “wlyfen” (compare to fox > fyxan, modern vixen), so we could have wifwlyfen.
A wifwolf suggests a change of both species and gender, which is an interesting idea.

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my friends call me 5 Dec 19, 2022

@johndumas @ConnorMoran

actually yes, that IS an interesting idea! I've seen some discussion of #trans 'werewolf' #fiction, for example, tho I'm not sure I've seen any actually being written.

wifwolves & werewylves ftw!

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John Dumas Dec 19, 2022

@sj5 @ConnorMoran Okay, now I desperately want to read a novel where someone changes both species and sex with the changing of the moon.

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Richard Dec 19, 2022

@johndumas @sj5 @ConnorMoran So English was an even more confusing language in the past? The ridiculous rules we use today are the simplified version of the language?

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John Dumas Dec 19, 2022

@richard_merren @sj5 @ConnorMoran Er, well kinda. Old English has grammatical gender, just like German (exactly like German, in that the genders are masculine, feminine, and neutral). That said, the textbook I used when learning Old English pointed out that “late in life he went to Rome” would have been understood in the OE period, though pronunciation would have been different.

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