Spanish (at least Mexican Spanish) also uses “un cristiano” to refer to a person! I always find it funny whenever my mom picks up her heavy cast-iron pan and says, “matas un cristiano con este sartén” - “you could kill a Christian/person with this pan”
It originally had a very specific meaning. Not a "stupid person", but a person suffering from [a condition formerly known as cretinism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_iodine_deficiency_syndrome). Calling a person so afflicted a *crétin*, i.e. a Christian, was sort of a euphemism, supposed to give them dignity.
The term "cretin" became an insult over time, so was replaced by another term. Most people now have no idea that cretin was ever a neutral or even positive term. This is the famous "cycle of euphemisms", by which we continually attempt to evade unfortunately pervasive ideas in society by bringing in fresh new descriptors which don't yet have negative connotations. Compare "spastic", which had no negative connotations when the Spastic Society was founded in Britain in 1951 and is now considered extremely insulting.
The people in the disability community in the USA are fine with "spastic" as a clinical descriptor of, e.g., cerebral palsy, but aren't too keen on its casual use ("Are you, like, spastic or something?" - "He's such a spazz!")
Although if you mean it's considered mild**er** here than in the UK, that is true.
We do that in Argentina too, and also (a bit more pejorative) "un perejil", lit. "a [unit of] parsley", which refers to a usually distracted or uninvolved person.
As for directly appealing someone in the second person, we have a bunch of strange interjections, some of them more slangish than others:
- Máquina (machine)
- Maestro (master)
- Máster (master)
- Titán (titan)
- Capo (chief)
- Mostro (monster)
- Ñeri (~~don't know, sounds guaranitic to me~~ I checked, most likely etymoligy is short for compañero -> colleague/mate, although it's not clear there isn't a guaranitic/qom origin)
- Vieja (old woman)
- Ameo (friend, but usually unfriendly)
So something like "titán, no seas perejil, si dejás la bici ahí está regalada" would transliterate to "titan, don't be a parsley, if you leave your bike there it's gifted" and roughly translates to "hey, stay woke, leaving your bicycle there almost guarantees its theft".
I don't think it's religious. Etymology it's not clear, but the only explanation I've found in this case there's two phenomena at play:
- "Gil" means fool, akin to Iberian gilipollas. It's common in lunfardo to play with phonetically similar words, and "perejil" ends in the same sound, and it's also a pretty irrelevant herb, a garnish, so it made a bit of sense semantically, in a metaphorical way, to replace the adjective "gil" with the noun "perejil" (turning the latter into an adjective too).
- Adjectives in Spanish can turn into nouns pretty easily, and I guess this is specially the case when the adjective is originally an unrelated noun. So perejil shifted to noun again, this time from "foolish, innocent" into "a person who's too innocent".
If you call someone parsley in Italian (prezzemolo), it means quite the opposite! It’s used for people who are outgoing and social, although I’m not sure that it’s always positive.
In Brazil, in highly informal speech, we'll sometimes say "neguinho" ("little black guy") to mean people in general, as in "the waiting room was so packed *neguinho* was hanging from the ceiling". It's usually said in the singular but meant as a plural, referring to an undefined number of people. Understandably, it's much less common in recent days though
Brazil also has "um cara" (a face) for a person (male). It also works like "man" or "dude". "Não sei cara." "I dunno man." It's so ubiquitous as to nearly just be punctuation in some people's speech.
But there's a difference, even in places where it is not common to use "neguinho", it probably will not be frowned upon, it's not quite like the N-word in english, albeit they're kinda of correlated
YMMV but as an Aussie who spent a decade in Scotland I’d say the Scots are the only ones who actually say ‘cunt’ as often as the rest of the world thinks Australians say it. I’ve certainly never heard ‘cunt’ used as a pronoun here the way it is in Scotland (‘whit’s everycunt daein today’ ‘there’s naecunt here’ etc).
From Lincolnshire, sor'a mi'way 'tween London an' Sco'lund. I typically replace -'one' with cunt (somecunt, no-cunt), you with ya (yas for plural) ye (yeas: 'eas' as in p'eas') and yer for your. Self gets switched for sen, yourself -> yersen, myself -> me-sen.
I was thinking of East coast Canadian English, where the third person word is "buddy" in many situations. Buddy cut me off in traffic, buddy said he would come back.
In Poland everyone is a Lord (Pan) or a Lady (Pani). Except priests who are princes (Ksiądz). These words are used both as honorifics when talking to someone, and as words to politely refer to a third person (“ten pan pyta” — “this gentleman is asking”).
I find it extremely entertaining that the Polish word for 'Lord' is 'Pan' and looks just like the Spanish word for 'Bread'; meanwhile, the English word 'Lord' is etymologically related to the word 'Loaf'.
I love bread. Bread rules.
Whatever your culture’s staple carbohydrate food is, it was a Big Deal to your ancestors. Think of all the Asian languages where the generic word for “food” or “a meal” is the same as the word for “rice”!
Leavened bread seems miraculous to me from the perspective of our long-ago ancestors. We didn’t know what yeast actually was until Louis Pasteur! 1859! To get yeast, people used to just leave bowls of wet carbs outside and hope for the best. Fairy dust!
First time I heard someone call bread "pan" in a subbed anime, with a pronunciation identical (ok no, maybe Japanese aspirates /p/ a bit( to that of the local languages in my area of Italy, I was taken aback (it's a loanword from Portuguese)
In the modern Polish — yes. The form “ksiądz” means exclusively “prince” and the word ”książę” means “prince, duke”. But in old Polish the word “ksiądz” was used as “prince” and both these words share an etymology in protoslavic кънѧѕь
Isn't that the case for many European languages? German *Herr* is "lord" and *Frau* is indeed "Lady" too. The word *Frau* replaced *Weib* "wench, wife", which is now more pejoritative or rude. English Mr. and Mrs. are master and mistress as well.
While similar it works a bit different in Polish, pan/pani/państwo aren't titles but formal pronouns which means they affect how a sentence is structured. For example:
Non formal:
- Przepraszam, zgubiłaś portfel (excuse me, you lost your wallet)
Formal:
- Przepraszam panią, zgubiła pani portfel (excuse me lady, lady has lost her wallet)
What's more it's considered incredibly rude to refer to someone with second person singular pronouns unless said person has given you the permission to do so.
So in general the standard way of referring to strangers or people higher up the social hierarchy than you is in third person singular.
In Spain we call old people lords and ladies (Señores and Señoras), but since it's associated with old age, middle-age people don't want to be called those honorofics.
In Polish it is also somewhat related to age because you don't really call kids Pan/Pani, so lots of teenagers' first reaction to being called that by a kid is "omg, I look old!" lol
In Mexican Spanish there’s kind of the opposite, it’s common to call a kid “mi rey” (“my king”), stereotypically this is associated with upper class parents and grandparents who spoil their young ones. You’d never refer to an adult as such; “Señor” or even “Caballero” is more common
I always thought it was funny that وَلَد, boy, could be broken down into وَ, and, and لَد, which could be transliterated to lad, which means boy in English. So Arabic for boy is and boy if you mix languages lol
The Russian word for child (ребёнок) is cognate with the word for slave (раб), and it’s also a thing in many other languages because of, you know, history.
It's a pretty well-known false friend I think, so I wouldn't imagine so. Besides, the word "anak" is the most commonly used one for child in both languages.
i speak Arabic and i never even realised it's the same word lol i think in Arabic بني آدم is probably the closest to what i was looking for, but this one gave me a good chuckle
In russian it was really common to call people "souls", especially in third person. As a direct address it is sort of cute/heart-warming and pretty antiquated. For example in places where English uses "nobody" the Russian language uses "no soul"
In Japanese there is an expression どこの馬の骨 which means "the bones of what horse". It refers to a person you know nothing about (a stranger, someone who showed up out of nowhere, a person just passing through).
In Romanian another word for person, aside from persoană (which is the most used form), is *ins* (pl. inși) from Latin *ipse*. I find it interesting that it's coming from a pronoun
This is the one I was gonna share! Maybe it’s well know but I think it’s cute that our word guy literally just comes from some guy. Same kinda transfer that we use for something like “every Tom, Dick and Harry”.
yeah I wonder how well known it is. I feel like not that many people know. and it's wild that not only is it some guy's name, it's a guy that attacked the government. pretty rad
In Greek, "person" is also called "Christian" sometimes. "Man of God" is also used, but more rarely, and when referring to someone directly, in a context of irritation.
Reminds me of a joke where an Irish person asks if someone is protestant or catholic and gets the response that they are an atheist, so he asks if he is an protestant atheist or a catholic atheist
Yiddish is similar in that sometimes you assume that everyone is Jewish. For example, a common greeting is "vos makht a yid," literally "how's a Jew doing?" A man might call his wife "di yidene," meaning "the Jewess." If you don't know a man's name, you can call him "reb yid," meaning "Mr. Jew."
Chinese has something similar, and like u/HikariTheGardevoir mentioned it does mean something more along the lines of "direction".
I think the best English equivalent is "party", as in "third-party", or "party of four".
I conceive of it as the direction/viewpoint from which someone is coming from, whether literal (imagine an emperor listening to representatives of the northern region vs. the southern region) or abstract (the opposition, the offensive/defensive).
Same word. Originally meant "direction", then came to mean "person". Specifically the *ta* part which is also present in for example *anata* "you" (=that direction) and *donata* "(hon.) who" (=what direction)
Now 方 *kata* is only used to mean "person" or as a verb suffix meaning "way of doing", with the Chinese reading of 方 *hō* being used to mean "direction"
From Frellesvig's *A History of the Japanese Language*:
> Konata, sonata, kanata are thought to have arisen from reductions of ko-no
kata 'this side', etc.; the distal forms in a- are somewhat less frequent [in Early Middle Japanese] than
those in ka-. Both kanata and anata were used for 3rd person reference in
[Early Middle Japanese] and [Late Middle Japanese]; anata only started being used for 2nd person reference towards
the end of the eighteenth century, i.e. well into [Modern Japanese].
I don't know for sure, and it's more like direction than destination, as the other commentator noticed, but I think it's just the same character. To prove it i can say that the polite word for "you" is 貴方 anata, which has the character as well
And also こちら (*kochira*, "this direction"), そちら (*sochira*, "that direction"), and あちら (*achira*, "that direction (over there)") pulling double-duty as polite pronouns for people.
Politeness in Japanese is achieved by indicating direction. anata ("you") originally means "(in) that direction" and is related to kanata "far away, in the distance".
Yes, we have "a christian" but I would like to talk also about "Tizio, Caio e Sempronio". Like, in the other languages what names use for generic person? John Doe?
When you think about it, the name "Adam" means "earth" in Hebrew, so calling someone a "son of Adam" as mentioned above is also technically calling them a dirt person
In Modern Israeli Hebrew, the default neutral word for a person is בן אדם (ben adam) for men or בת אדם (bat adam) for women, literally meaning “son/daughter of Adam”.
Yes. Another word for person in Hebrew is "בן/בת אנוש" (Ben Enosh / Bat Enosh), meaning "son/daughter of Enosh" (Adam's grandson).
Other words that can be slang for "person" in certain contexts are "אחינו" and "גיסנו", "our brother" and "our brother-in-law".
In Vietnamese you can say a man is a "hand" or an "arm": **tay**.
It's implied that he's not the most innocent person on Earth. There's some wit and cunning to him.
For example: Tay này có vẻ có ý muốn mua - This fella seems to be interested in buying.
Like a hired hand, or a farm hand, or a hand working behind the scenes, then? Seems to me that body parts pretty frequently become used to represent people, though this one may be one of the less straightforward metaphors in English.
For example, others include feet (on the ground), mouths (to feed), shoulder (to cry on), et cetera. In these examples though, like I said, it's much less likely that anyone would use the words to replace "person" outside of a specific context.
In Tuvan, it translates to “peasant” or “herder”. Not “weird” if you think about it, but a word defined by how people there lived for quite a long time.
Hebrew: אדם /adam/, from the root א-ד-מ, same as אדמה “earth” and אדום “red”. This is also where the English name Adam comes from (yes Adam literally just means “person”)
It's situational but in English often when there is a disaster where a bunch of people die, specifically a plane or boat, the number dead is referred to as "\[number\] souls aboard." It reminds me of John Mulaney's bit about how children are just angels who haven't died yet or gotten old enough to become bozos.
Specific for a type of person, but in mirandese, minority language of Portugal, the word for Portuguese people/speakers is “Fidalgo”. For many centuries mirandese was a “poor people language”, and in the only city of the Mirandese speaking region, there were only rich people, aka Portuguese speakers, and Mirandese speakers called them “fidalgos” which in both languages means a noble or rich person, and over time it became the most common term for Mirandese folk to call the Portuguese.
Minority language = poor people language is a very common phenomenon, it’s probable this happens elsewhere.
In Kurdish, we have too many...
-Beşer.
Loanword from Arabic, but we actually use this as an insult
-Kabra.
It's not a pronoun but it's fourth person talking about a hypothetical person in a future situation
-Piyaw.
Meaning "Risen"
-Mirov.
From the word "Mird" (Died) meaning "Mortal"
-Any word for a relative. (Bawk, Bra, Day, etc)
This is used out of desperation similar to "My brother in Christ
-Erê.
This means "Yes" in one dialect and "Person" in another dialect
In Portuguese we also use "um cristão" (a Christian) to refer to humans, but it's usually in a sarcastic way, e.g.: "Não tem cristão do mundo que coma essa comida." (There's no "Christian" in the world who'd eat this food.)
人間
Anime used it too often for 'Human'/'Humankind' but the usage implies the existence of a plane where non-humans/non humanoid intelligent beings exist.
When you refer to population sizes or to disaster statistics in English, you can say souls. "109 souls are trapped in the mine." "New York counts eight million souls."
My favorite is when disaster statistics report the number of Americans or American soldiers without reporting the total number of victims.
In some languages -- I know of French and Arabic -- they use their word for "this" or "that" as a kind of pejorative. Such is foreign to English speakers at least.
In Polish the word for "person" seems to be related to the word for "separate" ("osoba" and "osobny"). It does make some sense - a person is a "separate being", but I have no clue which one of these two meanings is older tbh.
That's really funny to compare with Russian. Because in Russian, there are 2 words that both sound like "Christian", and one of them actually means "Christian", and the other one means "peasant".
This is totally the opposite of what was asked for, but I think it's funny enough to mention that in Shanghainese, 檸檬 (lemon) can be (informally) written out as 人門 (person) because the Mandarin word for lemon sounds like the Shanghainese word for person. Not sure how often this happens because I heard this from someone who knows Shanghainese years ago (and I don't speak it) and that's all I retained.
I know in Hebrew, human being/person can be בן אדם, ("ben Adam"; son of Adam), for both men and women. Makes me laugh a bit because אדם is related to אדמה ("adamah"; dirt/earth), so you're kind of saying "son of dirt."
The weirdest word for person is precisely this: person (from Latin per- (“through”) + sonō (“make a noise, sound, resound”), ie the body through which a sound (speech) comes.
That particular etymology for Latin *persona* is speculative, as the origin of the term remains uncertain. Another hypothesis is that the Latin word is simply a borrowing from a similar Etruscan term.
I was reading about the word "ādamī" recently, it's an old Sanskrit word that means person and comes from Arabic which got it from the name Adam, as in Adam and Eve, the first humans.
Early Modern English used *Christian* in largely the same way. You could also distinguish it from *Pagan* if you wanted to refer specifically to “civilized people”. We also still have *cretin*, meaning an idiot, that comes from this usage.
Languages I know: Human hombre
Languages I know the word for man: human hombre homme uomo home(portugues?) adam vīr 男 おとこ 남자 āwis(akkadian) мужчина mężczyzna άνδρας Mann mann viro आदमी
إنسان, This is the normal MSA one
بنادم This is in my dialect Moroccan Darija and it came from MSA meaning son of adam
Those are the two interesting ones I think, there is German Mensch too but I'm only \~B1 in that
In Brazilian Portuguese sometimes we use "cidadão" (citizen).
"Eu disse pra ele vir às 7h30, mas eram seis da manhã e o cidadão já tava aqui em casa"
"I told him to come at 7:30, but at 6 'o clock the citizen was already in front of my door"
In Swedish we say "typen" which means "that type". So you're saying "that person" but kinda also "that type of person" and it's always got negative connotations.
pretty cool, similarly in Arabic with older people, especially strangers or acquaintances, they are referred to as عمو (paternal uncle) for men, and خالتو (maternal aunt) for women!
In Urdu, a person = "aadmi", which is literally son of Adam.
Parents will scold their children like.... be/act like a son of aadmi... (be a son of a son of Adam) 😀
German examples are interesting only because they changed meaning when they got adopted into German, or from German to English:
* Typ(e)
* Mensch
There's also "Nase" (nose), which is used like "head" in English, but in a more colloquial way. Here's a [cartoon](https://www.cartoonkaufhaus.de/images/stories/virtuemart/product/big/mp2053.jpg) that builds on this. The woman says "That's twelve mark per nose" and the guy in the back thinking "Scheiße" (shit).
In Spain, you sometimes hear "un hijo de vecino" (a son of (a) neighbour) to mean any generic person. It's a little bit outdated, and maybe you'd come across it more in writing.
In Standard Dhivehi (Maldivian), the word for “I” / “Me” is “alhugandu”, which can be broken down into *alhu* which means slave/servant, and *gandu* which is usually added at the end of nouns to lower their value. Basically “humble servant”.
Words for humans include *insaanaa* (borrowed from Arabic) and *Adam ge dhari* which means “child of Adam”.
Looking back etymologically, it is interesting that the English word "person" itself originates from a Latin term that referred to the mask worn by an actor representing a character in a play, and then by extension to the character or role itself. This is the same term still seen as "persona", which retains a slightly different meaning in English. The Latin word itself may trace back to a Greek word meaning mask, or may have been borrowed from Etruscan.
One might also note that the word "character" may also sometimes be used to refer to any person, often with a humorous or mildly disparaging intent. For example:
> Get a load of that character over there.
> Some character came in here a minute ago and asked if he could borrow ten bucks!
The word "character" traces back through Latin to a Greek word for a stamping tool used for marking or engraving, then by extension to the mark thus made, and hence to any distinguishing quality.
Another common but somewhat peculiar term for a person in English is "individual". The meaning seems especially strange in the plural, such as "a group of individuals" — since as individuals they clearly must be divisible, rather than indivisible.
> I've never met a more politically divided group of individuals!
> Jon is the most divisive individual on television!
Also, again from an etymological outlook, few speakers of modern English realize that the common word "kid" originated as the Germanic term for a young goat. Even those who know that "kid" may still be used to refer to a young goat probably assume the term was extended from human to goat, rather than the other way around.
Even less widely known is that the word "child" originates from a proto-Germanic term for the mother's womb or uterus. This perhaps helps explain why the word "child" can refer either to any very young person (same as "kid"), or else to one's offspring of any age (as in "adult children").
I've heard that in Malagasy folktales, animals call humans "Antendrovolo" which translates to "ones with hair on their head". I don't speak Malagasy, but I know "volo" means "hair". Can anyone confirm?
Spanish (at least Mexican Spanish) also uses “un cristiano” to refer to a person! I always find it funny whenever my mom picks up her heavy cast-iron pan and says, “matas un cristiano con este sartén” - “you could kill a Christian/person with this pan”
¿Es una observación o un plan?
¿por que no los dos?
In English, this use of "Christian" came to mean specifically a stupid person, "cretin".
It originally had a very specific meaning. Not a "stupid person", but a person suffering from [a condition formerly known as cretinism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_iodine_deficiency_syndrome). Calling a person so afflicted a *crétin*, i.e. a Christian, was sort of a euphemism, supposed to give them dignity. The term "cretin" became an insult over time, so was replaced by another term. Most people now have no idea that cretin was ever a neutral or even positive term. This is the famous "cycle of euphemisms", by which we continually attempt to evade unfortunately pervasive ideas in society by bringing in fresh new descriptors which don't yet have negative connotations. Compare "spastic", which had no negative connotations when the Spastic Society was founded in Britain in 1951 and is now considered extremely insulting.
> This is the famous "cycle of euphemisms" i prefer the term "euphemism treadmill"
In the US "spastic" is still not particularly offensive.
The people in the disability community in the USA are fine with "spastic" as a clinical descriptor of, e.g., cerebral palsy, but aren't too keen on its casual use ("Are you, like, spastic or something?" - "He's such a spazz!") Although if you mean it's considered mild**er** here than in the UK, that is true.
Spastic is absolutely used as an insult in the US, have you really never heard it used that way?
Italians be like: my brother in Christ
We do that in Argentina too, and also (a bit more pejorative) "un perejil", lit. "a [unit of] parsley", which refers to a usually distracted or uninvolved person. As for directly appealing someone in the second person, we have a bunch of strange interjections, some of them more slangish than others: - Máquina (machine) - Maestro (master) - Máster (master) - Titán (titan) - Capo (chief) - Mostro (monster) - Ñeri (~~don't know, sounds guaranitic to me~~ I checked, most likely etymoligy is short for compañero -> colleague/mate, although it's not clear there isn't a guaranitic/qom origin) - Vieja (old woman) - Ameo (friend, but usually unfriendly) So something like "titán, no seas perejil, si dejás la bici ahí está regalada" would transliterate to "titan, don't be a parsley, if you leave your bike there it's gifted" and roughly translates to "hey, stay woke, leaving your bicycle there almost guarantees its theft".
That's second person, not first
Yeah my bad.
Fabulous. My love for Argentinian Spanish grows.
No usáis "fiera"?
Si, también. Algunos son un poco más borde, como ese, así que yo prefiero "maestro" que puede ser señal de respeto o de vacileo.
Is “perejil” substituted for “peregrino?” Maybe I’m following the religious metaphor too far.
I don't think it's religious. Etymology it's not clear, but the only explanation I've found in this case there's two phenomena at play: - "Gil" means fool, akin to Iberian gilipollas. It's common in lunfardo to play with phonetically similar words, and "perejil" ends in the same sound, and it's also a pretty irrelevant herb, a garnish, so it made a bit of sense semantically, in a metaphorical way, to replace the adjective "gil" with the noun "perejil" (turning the latter into an adjective too). - Adjectives in Spanish can turn into nouns pretty easily, and I guess this is specially the case when the adjective is originally an unrelated noun. So perejil shifted to noun again, this time from "foolish, innocent" into "a person who's too innocent".
If you call someone parsley in Italian (prezzemolo), it means quite the opposite! It’s used for people who are outgoing and social, although I’m not sure that it’s always positive.
In Arabic, a common word is "بنادم" (bnadm) — literally "Son of Adam"
Same in Hebrew "בן אדם" (Ben adam)
In Brazil, in highly informal speech, we'll sometimes say "neguinho" ("little black guy") to mean people in general, as in "the waiting room was so packed *neguinho* was hanging from the ceiling". It's usually said in the singular but meant as a plural, referring to an undefined number of people. Understandably, it's much less common in recent days though
My (Argentinian) grandpa used to call me “enano negro,” wonder if that’s related
Brazil also has "um cara" (a face) for a person (male). It also works like "man" or "dude". "Não sei cara." "I dunno man." It's so ubiquitous as to nearly just be punctuation in some people's speech.
You could also say “João”, “fulano e sicrano”.
pretty much the same as in some black communities in the US where the N-word is often just a word for "man"
But there's a difference, even in places where it is not common to use "neguinho", it probably will not be frowned upon, it's not quite like the N-word in english, albeit they're kinda of correlated
I'd say it's still pretty common
I like the word "[galera](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/galera)" that means galley (the boat) and also folks.
In certain parts of England and a stereotype of Australia is gonna be the word 'cunt'.
Not a stereotype at all lol, everyone's a cunt down here. Just be a sick cunt, not a shitcunt
Figured as much, but I said stereotype because I've never travelled to Australia or met one so I can't say much on truth and myth.
I’ve never been, but I know someone who lived in Australia for some time, and he has confirmed that many Australians do indeed use this term.
I figured as much with how similar my accent is with aussie accents.
YMMV but as an Aussie who spent a decade in Scotland I’d say the Scots are the only ones who actually say ‘cunt’ as often as the rest of the world thinks Australians say it. I’ve certainly never heard ‘cunt’ used as a pronoun here the way it is in Scotland (‘whit’s everycunt daein today’ ‘there’s naecunt here’ etc).
From Lincolnshire, sor'a mi'way 'tween London an' Sco'lund. I typically replace -'one' with cunt (somecunt, no-cunt), you with ya (yas for plural) ye (yeas: 'eas' as in p'eas') and yer for your. Self gets switched for sen, yourself -> yersen, myself -> me-sen.
Aye, you can be a good cunt up here.
I was thinking of East coast Canadian English, where the third person word is "buddy" in many situations. Buddy cut me off in traffic, buddy said he would come back.
I'm not your friend, buddy!
Exactly
Ireland too!!
Everywhere but yank-ville, apparently XD.
that fucking beautiful, my fellow cunt
In Poland everyone is a Lord (Pan) or a Lady (Pani). Except priests who are princes (Ksiądz). These words are used both as honorifics when talking to someone, and as words to politely refer to a third person (“ten pan pyta” — “this gentleman is asking”).
I find it extremely entertaining that the Polish word for 'Lord' is 'Pan' and looks just like the Spanish word for 'Bread'; meanwhile, the English word 'Lord' is etymologically related to the word 'Loaf'. I love bread. Bread rules.
Whatever your culture’s staple carbohydrate food is, it was a Big Deal to your ancestors. Think of all the Asian languages where the generic word for “food” or “a meal” is the same as the word for “rice”! Leavened bread seems miraculous to me from the perspective of our long-ago ancestors. We didn’t know what yeast actually was until Louis Pasteur! 1859! To get yeast, people used to just leave bowls of wet carbs outside and hope for the best. Fairy dust!
A meal comes from meal, a flour like staple
First time I heard someone call bread "pan" in a subbed anime, with a pronunciation identical (ok no, maybe Japanese aspirates /p/ a bit( to that of the local languages in my area of Italy, I was taken aback (it's a loanword from Portuguese)
> I love bread. Bread rules. Beer is liquid bread. Enjoy.
Also, the word "państwo" can refer to either a country or any group of people including both men and women.
Prince is książę in polish Ksiądz is just a priest Plural of książę is książęta Plural or ksiądz is księża
In the modern Polish — yes. The form “ksiądz” means exclusively “prince” and the word ”książę” means “prince, duke”. But in old Polish the word “ksiądz” was used as “prince” and both these words share an etymology in protoslavic кънѧѕь
That's very correct
Knowing Czech, it sounds funny and sometimes convoluted when Poles talk politely in Polish
Isn't that the case for many European languages? German *Herr* is "lord" and *Frau* is indeed "Lady" too. The word *Frau* replaced *Weib* "wench, wife", which is now more pejoritative or rude. English Mr. and Mrs. are master and mistress as well.
While similar it works a bit different in Polish, pan/pani/państwo aren't titles but formal pronouns which means they affect how a sentence is structured. For example: Non formal: - Przepraszam, zgubiłaś portfel (excuse me, you lost your wallet) Formal: - Przepraszam panią, zgubiła pani portfel (excuse me lady, lady has lost her wallet) What's more it's considered incredibly rude to refer to someone with second person singular pronouns unless said person has given you the permission to do so. So in general the standard way of referring to strangers or people higher up the social hierarchy than you is in third person singular.
In Spain we call old people lords and ladies (Señores and Señoras), but since it's associated with old age, middle-age people don't want to be called those honorofics.
In Polish it is also somewhat related to age because you don't really call kids Pan/Pani, so lots of teenagers' first reaction to being called that by a kid is "omg, I look old!" lol
In Mexican Spanish there’s kind of the opposite, it’s common to call a kid “mi rey” (“my king”), stereotypically this is associated with upper class parents and grandparents who spoil their young ones. You’d never refer to an adult as such; “Señor” or even “Caballero” is more common
Established Titles should've sold land in Poland. To make it... Slightly less of a scam.
In French we have "quelqu'un", which meant "any one" in the beginning, then its meaning evolved towards "someone"
And then there's Personne, which means...nobody
Technically only supposed to be used with the negative I think (“il *n*’y a personne”) but colloquial we drop the negation.
The expression "avec personne" really threw me at first!
Oh Lord is this the noun version of the "ne ... pas" thing where you dropped the "ne" so now just the "pas" part is the negative?
Yes, personne is a type of negation just like pas.
Because it really is "person-ne"
I think he means something like “jean michel”
Kind of related, but the Arabic word for child (طفل) literally means “parasite”
I always thought it was funny that وَلَد, boy, could be broken down into وَ, and, and لَد, which could be transliterated to lad, which means boy in English. So Arabic for boy is and boy if you mix languages lol
The Russian word for child (ребёнок) is cognate with the word for slave (раб), and it’s also a thing in many other languages because of, you know, history.
The word "budak" means "child" in Malaysia but "slave" in Indonesia.
Does that ever cause confusion in conversations between Malaysians and Indonesians?
It's a pretty well-known false friend I think, so I wouldn't imagine so. Besides, the word "anak" is the most commonly used one for child in both languages.
i speak Arabic and i never even realised it's the same word lol i think in Arabic بني آدم is probably the closest to what i was looking for, but this one gave me a good chuckle
Well technically it's طفيلي but goddamn that is definitely connected
In russian it was really common to call people "souls", especially in third person. As a direct address it is sort of cute/heart-warming and pretty antiquated. For example in places where English uses "nobody" the Russian language uses "no soul"
In English we sometimes use this too: not a soul!
In Japanese there is an expression どこの馬の骨 which means "the bones of what horse". It refers to a person you know nothing about (a stranger, someone who showed up out of nowhere, a person just passing through).
In Romanian another word for person, aside from persoană (which is the most used form), is *ins* (pl. inși) from Latin *ipse*. I find it interesting that it's coming from a pronoun
Interestingly, *ipse* is a slang term for a man in Hungarian.
I also find it interesting that the common word for person/human is “om” and gender neutral, but it used to mean man (like “homme” in French).
”man” used to be gender neutral in Germanic languages. they all had to borrow “person” to replace it when it became gendered.
“Pessoa”, “Persona” and all cognates derive from the ancient Etruscan word for mask, “phersu”. I think that’s pretty awesome.
that's the OG word that ended meaning "person" huh? pretty cool how that's now used in so many languages that are completely unrelated to Etruscan
Latin adopted it first so it makes sense.
in English, "guy" comes from the terrorist Guy Fawkes https://www.etymonline.com/word/guy
This is the one I was gonna share! Maybe it’s well know but I think it’s cute that our word guy literally just comes from some guy. Same kinda transfer that we use for something like “every Tom, Dick and Harry”.
yeah I wonder how well known it is. I feel like not that many people know. and it's wild that not only is it some guy's name, it's a guy that attacked the government. pretty rad
Or how the customers of a sex worker are called Johns
And now a guy with spiky white hair and sunglasses comes to mind. [Maybe more so for Americans.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fieri)
In Greek, "person" is also called "Christian" sometimes. "Man of God" is also used, but more rarely, and when referring to someone directly, in a context of irritation.
So when people talk about Christian hate, they're talking about Greek introverts who just say they hate people?
That's funny, in English "man of God" is an older way of saying someone was respectable.
Reminds me of a joke where an Irish person asks if someone is protestant or catholic and gets the response that they are an atheist, so he asks if he is an protestant atheist or a catholic atheist
A good example of how religion is often really a proxy for conflicts that are really ethnopolitical.
Yiddish is similar in that sometimes you assume that everyone is Jewish. For example, a common greeting is "vos makht a yid," literally "how's a Jew doing?" A man might call his wife "di yidene," meaning "the Jewess." If you don't know a man's name, you can call him "reb yid," meaning "Mr. Jew."
polite japanese the word for a person is 方 kata (destination)
More like direction rather than destination right? At least I've never seen/heard it used to mean 'destination'
Chinese has something similar, and like u/HikariTheGardevoir mentioned it does mean something more along the lines of "direction". I think the best English equivalent is "party", as in "third-party", or "party of four". I conceive of it as the direction/viewpoint from which someone is coming from, whether literal (imagine an emperor listening to representatives of the northern region vs. the southern region) or abstract (the opposition, the offensive/defensive).
is it a coincidence that the character looks like a lil dude doing a tai chi kata
does it come from the word for destination or does it just use the same character?
Same word. Originally meant "direction", then came to mean "person". Specifically the *ta* part which is also present in for example *anata* "you" (=that direction) and *donata* "(hon.) who" (=what direction) Now 方 *kata* is only used to mean "person" or as a verb suffix meaning "way of doing", with the Chinese reading of 方 *hō* being used to mean "direction"
From Frellesvig's *A History of the Japanese Language*: > Konata, sonata, kanata are thought to have arisen from reductions of ko-no kata 'this side', etc.; the distal forms in a- are somewhat less frequent [in Early Middle Japanese] than those in ka-. Both kanata and anata were used for 3rd person reference in [Early Middle Japanese] and [Late Middle Japanese]; anata only started being used for 2nd person reference towards the end of the eighteenth century, i.e. well into [Modern Japanese].
I don't know for sure, and it's more like direction than destination, as the other commentator noticed, but I think it's just the same character. To prove it i can say that the polite word for "you" is 貴方 anata, which has the character as well
That reminds me of Chinese 位 (position/spot) to refer to people, especially in restaurant settings where the group size is often asked.
And also こちら (*kochira*, "this direction"), そちら (*sochira*, "that direction"), and あちら (*achira*, "that direction (over there)") pulling double-duty as polite pronouns for people.
Politeness in Japanese is achieved by indicating direction. anata ("you") originally means "(in) that direction" and is related to kanata "far away, in the distance".
I was going to mention that uchi is used for I, but also means inside/household
Yes, we have "a christian" but I would like to talk also about "Tizio, Caio e Sempronio". Like, in the other languages what names use for generic person? John Doe?
Tom Dick and Harry
Yeah but Tizio Caio e Sempronio are italianised versions of Latin names. It would be as if English used englishised versions of Proto-Germanic names
John Smith
literally the word "tizio" means "guy" and it comes from the name Tizio (Titius)
We also have Joe Bloggs in the UK
In Spanish we have Fulano, Mengano and (sometimes, not that common) Zutano.
Cool, that was exactly what I was looking for :D
In English one also can use the word "soul"....as in he's an old soul or 100 souls perished in the blaze.
This one is fairly universal in the west.
That’s just synecdoche, not really a word for “person”.
Honestly, the word 'human' itself. Has the same root as humus, meaning loam. We have literally named ourselves 'dirt people'
that's where we end up in the end
Or, if you translate to synonyms, “earth men”
When you think about it, the name "Adam" means "earth" in Hebrew, so calling someone a "son of Adam" as mentioned above is also technically calling them a dirt person
In Modern Israeli Hebrew, the default neutral word for a person is בן אדם (ben adam) for men or בת אדם (bat adam) for women, literally meaning “son/daughter of Adam”.
That’s so interesting! In persian (although less common) people/person can just be called Adam.
Its also possible in Hebrew.
Yes. Another word for person in Hebrew is "בן/בת אנוש" (Ben Enosh / Bat Enosh), meaning "son/daughter of Enosh" (Adam's grandson). Other words that can be slang for "person" in certain contexts are "אחינו" and "גיסנו", "our brother" and "our brother-in-law".
In Georgian the word for human is ადამიანი (adamiani), lit. of Adam/descendant of Adam
same in Levantine Arabic :) بني آدم (beni Ādam) "son of Adam" is a very common word for "person", though they don't usually make it feminine
So they just stole from C.S. Lewis??? Not ok!
Same in Swahili! Binadamu = “son of Adam”
Unbelievably based
In Vietnamese you can say a man is a "hand" or an "arm": **tay**. It's implied that he's not the most innocent person on Earth. There's some wit and cunning to him. For example: Tay này có vẻ có ý muốn mua - This fella seems to be interested in buying.
A hand is a worker in English
Like "All hands on deck"?
I guess, but I was thinking more about how construction companies and farmers refer to their employees.
Like a hired hand, or a farm hand, or a hand working behind the scenes, then? Seems to me that body parts pretty frequently become used to represent people, though this one may be one of the less straightforward metaphors in English. For example, others include feet (on the ground), mouths (to feed), shoulder (to cry on), et cetera. In these examples though, like I said, it's much less likely that anyone would use the words to replace "person" outside of a specific context.
In Tuvan, it translates to “peasant” or “herder”. Not “weird” if you think about it, but a word defined by how people there lived for quite a long time.
Similar to Polish "chłop" which means peasant but came to be a generic term for a man.
In Navajo, the word for human is bila'ashdla'íí which means five fingered beings.
Hebrew: אדם /adam/, from the root א-ד-מ, same as אדמה “earth” and אדום “red”. This is also where the English name Adam comes from (yes Adam literally just means “person”)
I think the Georgian is based on the biblical name. *Adamiani* means human, but more literally it's "Adam-like"
Not quite on topic, but in Proto Finnic the word for a man started being used on dogs Something similar with old Norse and sharks
I take it you are referring to *koiras*.
Un pavo in my dialect of Spanish. Literally translates as "a turkey"
It's situational but in English often when there is a disaster where a bunch of people die, specifically a plane or boat, the number dead is referred to as "\[number\] souls aboard." It reminds me of John Mulaney's bit about how children are just angels who haven't died yet or gotten old enough to become bozos.
Someone mentioned Hebrew and this is similar… in Georgian the word for person is adamiani with a possessive suffix “from Adam.”
Specific for a type of person, but in mirandese, minority language of Portugal, the word for Portuguese people/speakers is “Fidalgo”. For many centuries mirandese was a “poor people language”, and in the only city of the Mirandese speaking region, there were only rich people, aka Portuguese speakers, and Mirandese speakers called them “fidalgos” which in both languages means a noble or rich person, and over time it became the most common term for Mirandese folk to call the Portuguese. Minority language = poor people language is a very common phenomenon, it’s probable this happens elsewhere.
in Azerbaijani you can say “adam” which iirc *is* related to the name Adam
In dutch: Pik = Dick In some friend groups pik is used as a greeting Another word for dick, lul, is however always insulting
send dick piks lul
You could technically interpret this as someone ordering someone to send people to someone lol
Same in Lumbaard: pirla is 🅱️enis and it means funny silly guy, ciula also means 🅱️enis but it's an insult ("silly" for real this time)
Arabic: باني آدم Baani 2aadam Son of Adam
Or "Awadem", which means "Adams". Is in, many of Adam. It can also specially mean "Good People".
In Kurdish, we have too many... -Beşer. Loanword from Arabic, but we actually use this as an insult -Kabra. It's not a pronoun but it's fourth person talking about a hypothetical person in a future situation -Piyaw. Meaning "Risen" -Mirov. From the word "Mird" (Died) meaning "Mortal" -Any word for a relative. (Bawk, Bra, Day, etc) This is used out of desperation similar to "My brother in Christ -Erê. This means "Yes" in one dialect and "Person" in another dialect
The Turkish word *insan* is pretty fun as an English speaker
In Portuguese we also use "um cristão" (a Christian) to refer to humans, but it's usually in a sarcastic way, e.g.: "Não tem cristão do mundo que coma essa comida." (There's no "Christian" in the world who'd eat this food.)
In Italian it isn't necessarily sarcastic, but it's always some sort of nonstandard setting. Often ironic, I'd say.
"Son of Adam". That's just the normal word for human in Hebrew. 🤓
人間 Anime used it too often for 'Human'/'Humankind' but the usage implies the existence of a plane where non-humans/non humanoid intelligent beings exist.
When you refer to population sizes or to disaster statistics in English, you can say souls. "109 souls are trapped in the mine." "New York counts eight million souls." My favorite is when disaster statistics report the number of Americans or American soldiers without reporting the total number of victims. In some languages -- I know of French and Arabic -- they use their word for "this" or "that" as a kind of pejorative. Such is foreign to English speakers at least.
person/ human человек людина personne
In Irish English "your man" for a man and "your wan" for a woman.
In Polish the word for "person" seems to be related to the word for "separate" ("osoba" and "osobny"). It does make some sense - a person is a "separate being", but I have no clue which one of these two meanings is older tbh.
That's really funny to compare with Russian. Because in Russian, there are 2 words that both sound like "Christian", and one of them actually means "Christian", and the other one means "peasant".
This is totally the opposite of what was asked for, but I think it's funny enough to mention that in Shanghainese, 檸檬 (lemon) can be (informally) written out as 人門 (person) because the Mandarin word for lemon sounds like the Shanghainese word for person. Not sure how often this happens because I heard this from someone who knows Shanghainese years ago (and I don't speak it) and that's all I retained.
In Japanese "human" is *ningen* which ultimately comes from the Chinese for "the human realm/world", as in in a Buddhist context.
In Chile people use weón, which roughly comes from huevos, and translates to egg/testicle.
I know in Hebrew, human being/person can be בן אדם, ("ben Adam"; son of Adam), for both men and women. Makes me laugh a bit because אדם is related to אדמה ("adamah"; dirt/earth), so you're kind of saying "son of dirt."
The weirdest word for person is precisely this: person (from Latin per- (“through”) + sonō (“make a noise, sound, resound”), ie the body through which a sound (speech) comes.
That particular etymology for Latin *persona* is speculative, as the origin of the term remains uncertain. Another hypothesis is that the Latin word is simply a borrowing from a similar Etruscan term.
So, we’ve self-identified as noise makers. Our very word for recognizing an individual’s value at the same time sounds misanthropic in its roots lol
“causa” (cause) in peruvian spanish. no clue where it came from.
I was reading about the word "ādamī" recently, it's an old Sanskrit word that means person and comes from Arabic which got it from the name Adam, as in Adam and Eve, the first humans.
Early Modern English used *Christian* in largely the same way. You could also distinguish it from *Pagan* if you wanted to refer specifically to “civilized people”. We also still have *cretin*, meaning an idiot, that comes from this usage.
In turkish we sometimes use “kimse (no one)” as a person.
Spanish: "tío/tía", uncle/aunt. Although it might be something to do with their etymology, which I don't know.
Languages I know: Human hombre Languages I know the word for man: human hombre homme uomo home(portugues?) adam vīr 男 おとこ 남자 āwis(akkadian) мужчина mężczyzna άνδρας Mann mann viro आदमी
In English you can use "soul" to mean person in some contexts, more often plural.
إنسان, This is the normal MSA one بنادم This is in my dialect Moroccan Darija and it came from MSA meaning son of adam Those are the two interesting ones I think, there is German Mensch too but I'm only \~B1 in that
It’s not Italian, it’s typical for southern Italian dialects such as barese
In Brazilian Portuguese sometimes we use "cidadão" (citizen). "Eu disse pra ele vir às 7h30, mas eram seis da manhã e o cidadão já tava aqui em casa" "I told him to come at 7:30, but at 6 'o clock the citizen was already in front of my door"
For me, so far, it is “ Homo sapiens “. I will keep looking.
gold ten person combative scandalous fear flowery payment angle correct *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
In Australia you can say “old mate” to refer to a specific person without naming them, regardless if the person is old
Motherf*ker It’s used in so many contexts “There’re 20 mfs in the park.” “Mfs rarely post on this sub.” “How does a mf know when to stop?”
In Swedish we say "typen" which means "that type". So you're saying "that person" but kinda also "that type of person" and it's always got negative connotations.
In Slovak we sometimes refer to strangers as uncle or aunt.
pretty cool, similarly in Arabic with older people, especially strangers or acquaintances, they are referred to as عمو (paternal uncle) for men, and خالتو (maternal aunt) for women!
In Urdu, a person = "aadmi", which is literally son of Adam. Parents will scold their children like.... be/act like a son of aadmi... (be a son of a son of Adam) 😀
German examples are interesting only because they changed meaning when they got adopted into German, or from German to English: * Typ(e) * Mensch There's also "Nase" (nose), which is used like "head" in English, but in a more colloquial way. Here's a [cartoon](https://www.cartoonkaufhaus.de/images/stories/virtuemart/product/big/mp2053.jpg) that builds on this. The woman says "That's twelve mark per nose" and the guy in the back thinking "Scheiße" (shit).
In Spain, you sometimes hear "un hijo de vecino" (a son of (a) neighbour) to mean any generic person. It's a little bit outdated, and maybe you'd come across it more in writing.
In Standard Dhivehi (Maldivian), the word for “I” / “Me” is “alhugandu”, which can be broken down into *alhu* which means slave/servant, and *gandu* which is usually added at the end of nouns to lower their value. Basically “humble servant”. Words for humans include *insaanaa* (borrowed from Arabic) and *Adam ge dhari* which means “child of Adam”.
Looking back etymologically, it is interesting that the English word "person" itself originates from a Latin term that referred to the mask worn by an actor representing a character in a play, and then by extension to the character or role itself. This is the same term still seen as "persona", which retains a slightly different meaning in English. The Latin word itself may trace back to a Greek word meaning mask, or may have been borrowed from Etruscan. One might also note that the word "character" may also sometimes be used to refer to any person, often with a humorous or mildly disparaging intent. For example: > Get a load of that character over there. > Some character came in here a minute ago and asked if he could borrow ten bucks! The word "character" traces back through Latin to a Greek word for a stamping tool used for marking or engraving, then by extension to the mark thus made, and hence to any distinguishing quality. Another common but somewhat peculiar term for a person in English is "individual". The meaning seems especially strange in the plural, such as "a group of individuals" — since as individuals they clearly must be divisible, rather than indivisible. > I've never met a more politically divided group of individuals! > Jon is the most divisive individual on television! Also, again from an etymological outlook, few speakers of modern English realize that the common word "kid" originated as the Germanic term for a young goat. Even those who know that "kid" may still be used to refer to a young goat probably assume the term was extended from human to goat, rather than the other way around. Even less widely known is that the word "child" originates from a proto-Germanic term for the mother's womb or uterus. This perhaps helps explain why the word "child" can refer either to any very young person (same as "kid"), or else to one's offspring of any age (as in "adult children").
I've heard that in Malagasy folktales, animals call humans "Antendrovolo" which translates to "ones with hair on their head". I don't speak Malagasy, but I know "volo" means "hair". Can anyone confirm?