Talk:-man

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-man

Why should words ending in "man" be considered to have been formed by suffixation rather than by compounding? DCDuring TALK 02:47, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I think the stand alone meanings for man are not the same as the meanings for -man. So regarding the test I like to use "can it stand alone outside of compounds/derived terms with the same meaning?" no it can't. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:17, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Could you give a specific example? To me it seems that, in all apsects, including even the matter of loss of gender-specificity, "man" has all the meanings of "-man". As with the word "man" in an open compound, the precise relationship of "man" to the other element(s) in the compound is determined based in part on the specific semantics inherent in the other element(s) of the compound and in part on the context. DCDuring TALK 11:17, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Keep. I'd consider it a suffix when it has a reduced vowel (as in fireman, policeman, bail bondsman, chairman, Scotsman, gunman). When it has a full vowel, I don't think it's a suffix — superman, for example, seems like prefixation, and milkman and fellowman (which we don't list) feel like regular compounds to me — though of course I'd be open to evidence/arguments otherwise. —Ruakh_TALK 12:59, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

So, when a compound (say flag man) is first formed and "man" is stressed (as it almost always is in the case of flag man, in my experience) then man is the morpheme. But later, if the stress is lost, the morpheme has transformed to -man. How we treat this gets to the question of whether we are attempting to present historical etymology rather than morphology. In previous cases we have favored a historical approach. DCDuring TALK 16:23, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Re: the specific topic: I don't think there's a productive process that would cause "man" to become reduced. If it were to become reduced in "flagman", that would mean that "flag" + "man" had become reanalyzed as "flag" + "-man".   Re: the general question: I think I've always made my opinions clear on this point: there is no conflict between a diachronic and synchronic approach, because both are relevant. (The synchronic approach is usually necessary to explain the "why" of history.) The "we" you refer to has never included me, and I'm never going to be convinced by your perpetual appeals to it. —Ruakh_TALK 16:53, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

The pronunciation of such words can differ between speakers, so that's not really conclusive. I pronounce milkman with a schwa in the second syllable myself, and I could easily imagine superman being pronounced the same way. —CodeCat 21:05, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

If you pronounce milkman with a schwa, then I believe you're treating its -man as the suffix, rather than as the noun. Similarly for any speakers who pronounce superman with a schwa. Contrast, say, *housecət, or *landlɚd. —Ruakh_TALK 21:24, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Delete. Otherwise we need -woman, -boy, -girl, -person, etc. There is nothing etymologically different, and any spelling difference is a result of phonological context, not of suffixation. A pronunciation change is not evidence of affixation, merely of phonological context. The regional pronunciation will vary. Also, all of the previously noted compounds have "man" as the main element with a preceding adjective or attributive noun, not the other way round. --EncycloPetey 21:35, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Re: your last sentence: That's true of most English suffixes. The head of "realization", for example, is the noun suffix -ation. —Ruakh_TALK 22:22, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

By the way, I'll preemptively vote keep for [[-woman]] and [[-person]]. —Ruakh_TALK 22:24, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

The fact that (deprecated template usage) -ation determines the part of speech is irrelevant, since -ation derives from a Latin suffix (deprecated template usage) -ātiō. In Latin, the suffix almost always determined the part of speech, and any suffix derived from Latin is going to have that same property. The word (deprecated template usage) man is not from Latin; it comes from the Germanic origins of English, where words are formed by compounding existing words. This is thus and argument against keeping -man as an entry, just as we would not create a "suffix" entry for every German noun used as the final part of a German compound word.

An additional key difference is that (deprecated template usage) -ation is not an independent word or morpheme; it only occurs as part of another word. Latin suffixes may determine the part of speech, but they add no lexical component to the root. By contrast, (deprecated template usage) man, (deprecated template usage) woman, etc. are all independent words whose original meaning is still clear and present in the compounded words formed. If there were no independent word (deprecated template usage) man, or if the supposed suffix -man had a radically different meaning from man, then I'd agree that we should keep it. However, neither of these conditions is true here. --EncycloPetey 22:49, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

• Weak delete. Maybe I could be convinced, you could probably argue it either way. FWIW, the OED's recently-revised M section does not consider man to be a suffix. Ƿidsiþ 17:01, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

FWIW the French section (and also for -woman) should remain whatever; they are both formative suffixes in French, albeit for a small number of words (tennisman and rugbyman are two). Also there is no relevant French sense of man. I remain unconvinced that the same sense of 'man' in fireman can exist independently, so I'm still leaning towards a keep. --Mglovesfun (talk) 20:47, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

• I'd say it signifies we may have a missing sense of (deprecated template usage) fire, and not of man, since there is also (deprecated template usage) firefighter, (deprecated template usage) firehouse, and (deprecated template usage) firedog (animal sense). Either that, or possibly fireman developed from a model of the construction of firefighter. --EncycloPetey 04:33, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

  I doubt that it is a sense of (deprecated template usage) fire rather than that there are alternative "case"/prepositional relationships possible between the head of a compound noun and its modifier. One kind of (deprecated template usage) fireman tends a fire, another kind fights/extinguishes them. For (deprecated template usage) firedog and (deprecated template usage) firehouse perhaps it could be a "genitive" relationship: "of or pertaining to". The context probably determines which meaning is either pulled from the lexicon or constructed morphologically. DCDuring TALK 05:34, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

• Keep. What about bondsman? bd2412 T 20:55, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

  What about it? ="man in bonds"; no special meaning of "man" is required. --EncycloPetey 20:59, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

• Is there any morpheme which isn't classifiable as an affix under this logic? Someone can always assert that some people, sometimes pronounce the compound with the appropriate stress to justify the assertion. We have negligible ability to verify such assertions unless we rely on lemmings.

Aren't we just making duplicative work for us and implying that any omitted senses in our affix definitions are in some weak sense improper? For inflected forms, for prepositional phrases, for nouns used attributively we try to avoid duplication. Why is this different? DCDuring TALK 21:30, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

Keep, since nobody (in my opinion) has rebutted my argument above, I'll assume it's good. Mglovesfun (talk) 08:41, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

kept, no consensus -- Liliana • 17:27, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Pronunciation

I think there should be a pronunciation made for this suffix, noting the distinction between the full vs reduced vowel, the latter found in words like horseman, sportsman, huntsman, freeman, bondsman, fireman, policeman, etc. They seem to pertain more to professions and this is also the pronunciation found in English surnames that are based on these words. It's worth noting because people not familiar with the English language might not notice the distinction and assume the pronunciation is the same as the word 'man' itself. Word dewd544 (talk) 16:30, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

a man or woman

According to page 721 of Collins English Usage

Plural nationality nouns ending in '-men' sometimes refer to both men and women. Similarly, singular nouns ending in '-man' are sometimes used to refer in a general way to a person of a particular nationality

--Backinstadiums (talk) 16:34, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

RFD discussion: May–August 2022

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-man

-woman

-person

In WT:Tea room/2022/April#-mate_suffix?, several users opined this should be deleted and railwayman, newsman, etc should be seen as compounds of man. I have no strong feelings, but the last RFD was a decade ago and kept it only due to "no consensus", so it's ripe for a fresh look. Keep !voters in 2011 noted that the pronunciation is sometimes reduced, but I don't see why that'd make it a suffix: it's not true of -woman or -person AFAIK (and saying horseman uses a suffix but horsewoman is a compound seems non-parsmonious), and are we going to start saying that while whortleberry with 'full' pronunciation is a compound, raspberry with reduced pronunciation has a suffix *-berry? (It literally doesn't, the earlier form was raspis berry.) Pinging everyone from the Tea Room thread: @Equinox, Vininn126, DCDuring, Leasnam. Perhaps the "ship" sense, if it exists only for (-)man, should be treated differently from the rest.   - -sche (discuss) 00:04, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

• I haven't seen any good argument that would keep -woman and -person. As to -man, this discussion will be on three(?) talk pages once concluded. So if we decide to simplify matters by not going down the reduced-pronunciation rathole, with the twists and turns that you describe, we will still explain and honor the alternative view. I wonder whether the reduced pronunciation "man" in compounds will become obsolete in an ever-more-gender-sensitive society. DCDuring (talk) 00:59, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

• Delete all. Also I believe some pages have -mate as a suffix. Vininn126 (talk) 09:40, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

• Keep all. I used to be dubious about -man in particular, but I now find that Lexico lists all three of these. There must be hundreds of entries that treat -man as a suffix, which would cause problems if it was deleted. So I think we have to keep all three. DonnanZ (talk) 08:15, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

• Leaning keep as to all. I'm pretty sure there is a pronunciation shift in terms like chairman, chairwoman, and chairperson. bd2412 T 00:28, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

• Not sure, but there are lots of reliable sources describing them as either suffixes or compounds. Facts707 (talk) 06:21, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

• Keep all. A perusal of Category:English words suffixed with -man shows some words that feel very compoundy (like snowman) but many (like fireman) that seem to be the result of a very productive suffix -man that was, in its day, equivalent to -er or -an or -ite. I think the confusion is due to its recent decline in productivity and its reinterpretation due to the semantic shift in man that has occurred in the centuries after the development of -man. Etymologically, -man’s no different from -dom or -hood, whose suffixal status seems indisputable. As for -woman and -person, I’d say they’re neologistic suffixes analogically based on a folk etymology of -man. Lereman (talk) 19:26, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

  @Lereman: -woman is not neologistic: it is used since Middle English. J3133 (talk) 20:08, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

  Potato, potato. ME is certainly neo relative to OE morphemes like -man(n), and more to the point, relative to the ME semantic shift in man. Lereman (talk) 20:15, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

  @Lereman: neologistic surprised me as not appropriate for ME (“Of or pertaining to neologisms”; neologism: “A word or phrase which has recently been coined […] 15–20 years is a common cutoff”. J3133 (talk) 20:43, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

  What is the folk etymology of -man you mention (“From the noun man”, thus as the meaning of man changed, so did the meaning of -man). J3133 (talk) 20:57, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

  I'm not sure I follow your question, or if this is even a question. The folk etymology I refer to is outlined in your parenthesis. If, however, the parenthesis is meant to suggest that -man should be expected to undergo semantic shift in lockstep with a semantic shift in man, I would say it begs the question, and in somewhat extreme fashion: not only would that idea depend on this being a compound (since suffixes don't behave this way; it's not like -dom has followed the semantic shift of doom), but it would almost have to be an ad hoc compound newly formed in every instance so that no compound ending in +man has an independent semantic life of its own. After all, compounds don't normally undergo semantic shift when there's a semantic shift in one element of the compound (cf. nosegay, sweetmeats, shellfish, gospel, gangway). To reiterate, my overall point here is that although tacking man to the end of a word today feels like forming a compound with PDE man, a look at the occurrences of -man shows a suffix (descended ultimately from OE mann) that was once quite productive (for centuries after the initial semantic shift in man, but without being subject to that shift) and has since become less- or nonproductive. We don't delete suffixes for being nonproductive, and we shouldn't delete this one just because it's spelled like ad hoc compounding we might do today. Lereman (talk) 17:22, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

  @Lereman: The etymology in my parenthesis is from the entry -man; if it is a folk etymology, should it not be changed? J3133 (talk) 17:27, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Delete. I'm not sold on the argument from "man isn't stressed in fireman so it must be a suffix". I mean, house isn't stressed in firehouse, nor trap in firetrap, but presumably we wouldn't call those suffixes. If we do keep this, then I think we need to distinguish between any supposed old suffixed word and any newer one that actually uses man as a component. How, I have no idea. Equinox ◑ 07:56, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

man is not only unstressed in fireman but it is reduced by most speakers, so it sounds like ‘firemun’ (it would sound rather Northern if it weren’t) but firehouse isn’t reduced to firehus, so I say weak keep (unsure about -woman and -person). Overlordnat1 (talk) 08:09, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

I think this is an indication that the parts have become more completely fused, so that the perception as separate parts no longer interferes with the normal phonological rules that govern pronunciation within words. I'm not convinced that such fusion necessarily means that the the unstressed parts are morphologically subordinate to the others. Do we need a suffix "-shire" because English people pronounce county names with the vowel reduced compared to the vowel in shire as a separate word? Is the difference in pronunciation of words like raspberry an indication that English people have a suffix "-berry" that we lack in the US? Chuck Entz (talk) 14:19, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

I’ve always thought of -berry and -shire as suffixes for that reason but my intuition might easily simply not correspond to reality in this instance. Overlordnat1 (talk) 20:54, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Keep for all three, per previously shared arguments. AG202 (talk) 23:05, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

RFD-kept (by no consensus), 5-3 for -man, 4-3 for -person & -woman. (or 5-4, 4-4 if DCDuring's comment is counted as a delete vote) AG202 (talk) 13:29, 2 August 2022 (UTC)