Saying that language shapes us as much as we shape it at this point has become a mere truism; yet, there are moments when I become aware of this anew—just as I have now, upon beginning to read the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, a process that inevitably involves also stepping outside the confines of my own native language (which is yet another benefit of emigration).
I had never thought deeply about the words ‘mężczyzna’ (a man, an adult male) and ‘kobieta’ (a woman, an adult female) before, and the fact that—unlike their English counterparts—they are clearly distinct from one another never really registered since they are simply a natural part of my native language, just like any other element of it, and I use them as instinctively as I breathe or walk. Reading de Beauvoir, however, made me realise that the situation is different when it comes to the English terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’—the latter sounds almost like a subspecies of the former, and on top of that, ‘man’ also means a human, a person regardless of gender or sex, usually an adult, which, by the way, was not always the case: etymologically, the word ‘woman’ derives from the Old English ‘wīfmann’, which essentially meant ‘female person’, and the term ‘mann’ referred primarily to a person or human being (mankind), although it could also, on occasion, denote an adult male; the word ‘wer’ was used more specifically for a man.
De Beauvoir’s own native French is less revealing of this particular linguistic bias than English. The word ‘homme’ means a man but also a human being (as in les droits de l’homme, traditionally ‘human’, although ‘être humain’ is another expression for a human being), and ‘femme’ denotes a woman. Still, they don’t share the same twisted relationship as their English counterparts.
But in the end, the Polish and French societies have been just as patriarchal as English society, so the truism may not withstand scrutiny, after all.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
