# Icelandic: maður (karlmaður) / kona (kvenmaður)



## Alxmrphi

Hi all,

I've always known "man" and "woman" in Icelandic to be *maður* and *kona*.
I've recently seen *karlmaður* and looked it up and it apparently has the same meaning, I know '*karl*' is something that marks something as masculine (*karlkyn* - masculine) and I wondered about '*woman*' so I looked for '*kvenkona*' thinking it would be the oppiste (marker for feminine words and the other word for woman) but I couldn't find that..

But then I saw '*kvenmaður*'... which is the feminine marker (*kvenkyn* - feminine) which is the feminine marker on the word for '*man*' that actually means '*woman*'..

So all this is a bit confusing for me.

Could someone explain the difference to me, if any.
Also if anyone who knows the other Scandinavian languages is reading this, does this happen in your own language, if so what does it mean in that case (it probably has a lot of relevance if it does exist in another related language).

Takk.


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## Magb

The word _maður_ (Old Norse _maðr_) used to have the wider meaning of "human being". It's only in the past 1000 years or so that it's been used to mean "male human being" specifically, and some remnants of the original meaning can be seen in words like the ones you're asking about.

An exactly parallel development happened in English. The word "man" used to mean "human being", just like _maðr_. While it's now primarily used to refer to males specifically, it still retains the original meaning in some contexts (e.g. "the best laid plans of mice and men"), and in words like "mankind". In Old English the words _wer_ and _wif_ were used to mean what we now call "man" and "woman". The word "woman" is a corruption of the original _wifman_ ("female human"), which, as you can now see, is a construction very similar to the Icelandic _kvenmaður_.


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## Alxmrphi

Hi Magb,

That's very interesting, I can see the comparison, an oldish meaning, it was in relation to someone talking about a statue of a famous person, calling him the *Most famous man*... in relation to something so maybe this is just an elevated way of calling him this..

'Man' is used to mean 'human being' a lot still, like "The best thing that's happened to man" - it encompases every human being, but, like you say, these things change a lot.

So 'woman' came from 'wifman', I'm not really good with linguistic terminology, could you explain what you mean by a '*corruption*'... is it just a copy of the word that has changed over time?

Thanks!
- Alex


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## Magb

Alex_Murphy said:


> 'Man' is used to mean 'human being' a lot still, like "The best thing that's happened to man" - it encompases every human being, but, like you say, these things change a lot.



Yes, true. As an abstract concept "man" is still widely used to refer to humans in general. The main difference is that nowadays if you say "a man", "the man", etc., it can only refer to a male, never to a woman. That wasn't the case originally.



Alex_Murphy said:


> So 'woman' came from 'wifman', I'm not really good with linguistic terminology, could you explain what you mean by a '*corruption*'... is it just a copy of the word that has changed over time?



"Corruption" isn't a serious linguistic term, to be honest. I just used it informally to describe the somewhat odd change from the original Old English pronunciation /'wi:fman/ (with a long "ee" type sound), to the later pronunciation /'wɪman/ (with a short vowel sound as in "bit") to the modern /'wʊmən/ (with a rounded vowel as in "book"). Note, by the way, how the pronunciation of the plural "women" is /'wɪmən/, retaining the vowel of the late Old English/Early Middle English _wimmen_.

Another interesting thing is that as the word "woman" became the dominant word meaning "female human" in English, the word "wife" gradually came to mean "married woman". The exact same thing happened in Danish and Norwegian, where _kone_ (obviously related to the Icelandic _kona_) now mainly means "wife". The original meaning "woman" can still be seen in some compounds like _spåkone_ "female fortune teller". English words like "midwife", "fishwife", etc. show a similar tendency.


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## Alxmrphi

> Old English pronunciation /'wi:fman/ (with a long "ee" type sound), to the later pronunciation /'wɪman/ (with a short vowel sound as in "bit") to the modern /'wʊmən/ (with a rounded vowel as in "book"). Note, by the way, how the pronunciation of the plural "women" is /'wɪmən/, retaining the vowel of the late Old English/Early Middle English _wimmen_.



That's really fascinating! Where did you learn about all this?
I hadn't ever thought about how we pronounce the 'o' in the woman / women, because it's only the 'e' that changes, and how the Old English 'wif' (woman) drifted to mean 'wife' (married woman)..

There is only one thing I wasn't sure about, I don't think *kona* in Icelandic has mainly the wife-meaning, but the more general woman-meaning, but that wouldn't surprise me at all because the reason this language is what it is because it was sheltered from many changes that took place in related languages...

Thanks for opening up this discussion, it is very interesting!


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## Magb

Alex_Murphy said:


> That's really fascinating! Where did you learn about all this?



Well, I spend a lot of my spare time reading about linguistics, including historical linguistics, etymology and such. I'm purely self-taught when it comes to all of this though, so I'm sure I get some details wrong here and there.



Alex_Murphy said:


> There is only one thing I wasn't sure about, I don't think *kona* in Icelandic has mainly the wife-meaning, but the more general woman-meaning, but that wouldn't surprise me at all because the reason this language is what it is because it was sheltered from many changes that took place in related languages...



Yes, that's what I meant; sorry if that was unclear. In Icelandic and Faroese _kona_ primarily means "woman", but it can sometimes mean "wife". In Danish and Norwegian _kone_ primarily means "wife", but it can sometimes (rarely) mean "woman". The word _kona_ exists in Swedish as well, but it isn't much outside of compounds like _trollkona_.

To add a few more tidbits, in Old Norse _kona_ was an alternate form of _kvenna_/_kvinna_. In modern Icelandic _kvenna_ is the plural genitive of _kona_. In Danish, Norwegian and Swedish the modern cognates are _kvinde_, _kvinne_ and _kvinna_ respectively -- all meaning "woman". All of these are related to the English word _queen_, and to, for instance, the Greek word _gyné_ "woman", as featured in Greek loanwords like "*gyne*cology" and "miso*gyn*y".

Here's a nifty page showing more cognates in other languages: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European_*gʷḗn. As you can see all of these words are assumed to have descended from an ancient word that you might spell something like _gwéen_.


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## Alxmrphi

Yeah I was just going to ask if it would be Proto-Indo-European, but then I saw the title of the page, exactly that!



> In Icelandic and Faroese _kona_ primarily means "woman", but it can sometimes mean "wife"


Yep, exactly - _*konan hans heitir Inga*_ (His wife is called Inga)



> in Old Norse _kona_ was an alternate form of _kvenna_/_kvinna_. In modern Icelandic _kvenna_ is the plural genitive of _kona_


I did read about this genitive form of 'kona' and it did mention it was an irregularity, maybe this explains where it comes from.
All this is getting extremely complicated, where woman becomes queen....... strange, so an old Icelandic (or rather Old English/Norse) word for woman became queen, or something similar, in some descendent languages...

I don't even want to imagine where *drottning* came from.
[Edit] : ok I did so a little search and found out it came from *álfadrottning* (Queen of the elves / elven queen), which is very much 'Icelandic style' (elves/faries/goblins) so maybe that explains the independant meaning and why it isn't related to its preceding language version (Kvinna/Kvenna - Old Norse) but skipped to other languages like English (Queen).


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## thegooseking

Alex_Murphy said:


> ok I did so a little search and found out it came from *álfadrottning* (Queen of the elves / elven queen), which is very much 'Icelandic style' (elves/faries/goblins) so maybe that explains the independant meaning.



May I ask where you researched that? Wiktionary lists *álfadrottning* as a derivative of *drottning*. It seems like you're saying that's the wrong way round. I know Wiktionary isn't always (or even usually) the most reliable source, but it seems plausible. It seems strange if it is the wrong way round, since *álfadrottning* follows the pattern for compound words in Icelandic, from the genitive plural of *álfur* + *drottning*.

Actually, also according to Wiktionary (unfortunately), the Danish/Norwegian word *dronning* is derived from the Old Norse *drótning* (_queen_) which is the female version of *dróttin* (_lord, leader_), which in turn comes from *drótt* (_band, flock_). It's not a huge stretch of the imagination to believe that the Icelandic/Swedish *drottning* came from the same source.


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## Alxmrphi

Yeah it was Wikitionary...

Ahh yeah, I saw '*derivitive forms*' and assumed '*drottning was derived from*' rather than 'derived from this term is:'

I'm no good at researching stuff like this so probably got it the complete arse-end-up.
I didn't know '*drótning*' was 'Queen' in Old Norse, I think I assumed it was something like kvinna, or I got mixed up..

Ahhh.. MagB's explainations of words meaning 'woman' becoming 'queen' in English confused me, I guess I thought that it meant 'queen' in Old Norse and wondered why Icelandic differed, rather than realising that in fact nobody even mentioned what 'queen' would be in Old Norse.

Thanks for the clarification!


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