Man/Husband Etymology (SV)

In swedish, the word for husband is “man” (pronounced where the vowel uses the back of the throat, like in “ball”). The word for “wife” is “hustru” or “fru”. I read that the word for husband was, at one point, “husman”. The word “hus” means “house”.

I’m inferring that “husman” = “house man”, and “hustru” is an irregular spelling of “husfru” (t -> f). I need to look that up still.

In one of the recent exercises, they used “man” to mean “one”, as in “one might say that…” or “if one were so inclined”. E.g. it means “some anonymous person”.

The practice phrase was “Hur säger man …” (“How do you say”, literally “How does one say”).

This got me wondering “Why does ‘man’ mean both ‘one’, ‘man’ (singular), and ‘husband’, when women have “kvinna” (woman, singular), “fru” (wife, like “Mrs.”), and “hustru” (wife). Also, in the somewhat-obsolete phrasing “I now pronounce you man and wife”, is that derived from the same etymological roots?

In one discussion I found about this, user Kate Bunting says:

The marriage service in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer contains the statement “I pronounce that they bee man and wyfe together.” This is ‘Early Modern English’, not ‘Old English’. Wife may still have meant woman in some contexts, but its primary meaning by this time was female spouse.

Etymology of “Man”

The Oxford English Dictionary says:

A human being (irrespective of sex or age). Man was considered until the 20th cent. to include women by implication, though referring primarily to males. It is now frequently understood to exclude women, and is therefore avoided by many people. In some of the quotations in this section, it is difficult or impossible to tell whether man is intended to mean ‘person’ or ‘male human being’.

Etymonline’s entry for “man” has:

( … ) The specific sense of “adult male of the human race” (distinguished from a woman or boy) is by late Old English (c. 1000); Old English used wer and wif to distinguish the sexes, but wer began to disappear late 13c. and was replaced by man. ( … )

Noted below, but “wer” is the origin from which “{wer}ewolf” derives, this was considered the word of equal gendered parity to a lady’s “wif” label.

Similarly, Latin had homo “human being” and vir “adult male human being,” but they merged in Vulgar Latin, with homo extended to both senses. A like evolution took place in Slavic languages, and in some of them the word has narrowed to mean “husband.”

I think this is an important distinction here – at some point in history, the words “man” and “husband” were equivalent. So a phrase like “man and wife”, which would have previously been “wer and wif”, was, at the time, considered to be labels of equal bearing.

Man also was in Old English as an indefinite pronoun, “one, people, they.” It was used generically for “the human race, mankind” by c. 1200.

This alternate derivative meaning seems to possibly be the root of some of the modern strife. When “man” becomes the “default” descriptor for a human, then any contrasting label becomes an exception, possibly implying that they are in a different category. i.e. Were “man and wife” to mean “a human being and his wife”, then logically this suggests that the latter wife is not a human being!

A slightly more accurate “Two humans, one of whom is a wife” restores the humanity but doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well, and also still imposes an unequal gendered quality to it, like “oh it’s a basketball, but for girls.”

Etymology of “Husband”

Etymonline describes the etymology of “husband” as:

Middle English housbond, hosebonde, husbond, husbund, from Old English husbonda “male head of a household, master of a house, householder,” which is probably from Old Norse husbondi “master of the house,” literally “house-dweller,” from hus “house” (see house (n.)) + bondi “householder, dweller, freeholder, peasant,” from buandi, present participle of bua “to dwell” (from PIE root *bheue- “to be, exist, grow,” and compare bond (adj.)). From late 13c. it replaced Old English wer as “married man (in relation to his wife)” and became the companion word of wife, a sad loss for English poetry. Old English wer, in the broadest sense “man, male person” (from PIE root *wi-ro- “man”), is preserved in werewolf.

And “bond” is related to the notion of “bondage” to land:

c. 1300, “in a state of a serf, unfree,” from bond (n.) “tenant, farmer holding land under a lord in return for customary service; a married bond as head of a household” (ibid)

“Husband” (or one of its roots, at least) was even considered to be a bit of a denigrating label at one point:

“In the more despotic Norway and Denmark, bo’ndi became a word of contempt, denoting the common low people. … In the Icelandic Commonwealth the word has a good sense, and is often used of the foremost men ….” (OED). The sense of the noun deteriorated in English after the Conquest and the rise of the feudal system, from “free farmer” to “serf, slave” (c. 1300) and the word became associated with unrelated bond (n.) and bound (adj.1).

Etymology of “Wife”

Etymonline’s entry for “wife” says:

Middle English wif, wyf, from Old English wif (neuter) “woman, human female, lady,” also in late Old English, “female partner in a sanctioned union” (wedded wife). This is from Proto-Germanic *wīfa- (source also of Old Saxon, Old Frisian wif, Old Norse vif, Danish and Swedish viv, Middle Dutch, Dutch wijf, Old High German wib, German Weib), a word of uncertain origin and disputed etymology, not found in Gothic. ( … ) Apparently felt as inadequate in its basic sense, leading to the more distinctive formation wifman (source of woman).

“Man!” and “Wife!”

There are obvious implications reflecting the gender politics of the time with the way the nouns “man”, “wife”, “woman”, “husband”, etc. exist.

In the phrase “man and wife”, the initial connotation is that “man” is the significant entity in the sentence; the one that exists, and “wife” becomes an attachment, a possession, of the former. This is how I think most people contemporarily view this old phrasing, and is probably why it’s generally avoided in most modern services.

So it would be “MAN! (also a wife is here)”

But I also considered what it might mean if “man” was meant in the connotation of “an everyman”, “it could be anyone!”, “a human, interchangeable with another.” Through this lens, the phrasing “man and wife” reads more as “a person and a wife”, where the identity of “wife” becomes the significant role in this union.

Or, “WIFE! (but also a man is here)”

Either way it’s viewed, there’s an obvious contextual disparity and it lacks equanimity. The modern, more egalitarian, adaptation of “husband and wife” at least presents the two individuals on a more equal footing with regard to their new roles in a union.

Esposo vs. Marido

I found this to be really interesting, as well. In spanish, there are two words for husband: “marido”, and “esposo”. The word for wife is “esposa”, though “mujer” (the word for woman) is also used. The word “man” is “hombre”.

So there is gendered parity with “esposo” (male spouse) and “esposa” (female spouse). “Marido” is a cognate of “married” and is colloquial / common tongue (and would be paired with “mujer”, i.e. “marido y mujer”). “Esposo” and “esposa” are a bit more formal, like how in english we typically say “my wife / my husband” and not “my spouse” – there’s a bit of relational distancing / formality that happens with “spouse”.

Importantly, there is no “marida”! Some discussions I saw indicated that saying “marida” is a surefire way to out yourself as someone that’s still learning.

There is a verb “maridar” meaning “pair” (similar to “could you marry these sauce containers?”), but the word for “married” would be “casado” or perhaps “conyugal” (cognate for “conjugal”, I presume).

Compared to other languages

Of the four languages I’m studying, here’s the equivalence for each:

Noting that in the current coursework I’m doing, the word for “wife”, “Mrs.”, and “woman”, are all “خانم” (pron. “khanohm”). Google Translate does note synonyms for this word as “lady, wife, madam, mistress, dame, missy”, so this sounds a bit more colloquial / casual.

The spanish and swedish labels kind of have opposite parity. Spanish has a pair “esposo / esposa” with “mujer” counting as either, and “marido” being the special call-out label. Swedish has a (deprecated) pairing “husman / hustru”, with “man” counting as either, and “kvinna” being the sole standout.

That said, spanish is broadly a male-default language (add 1 boy to a group of girls, and it goes from “ellas” to “ellos”, but it doesn’t work in the other direction), and swedish only has “gendered” or “neutuered” words (eg. “en” words are “gendered”, and “et” words are “neutered” – more on that another time).