alt Hacker NewsI could intuit the pronunciation but I didn’t make the connection from “wif” to “woman” in general. In hindsight I should have, after all we have words like “midwife” which doesn’t refer to a person’s actual married partner.
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remyp • yesterday at 6:28 PM
I’m a native English speaker and I think this is an easier jump if you know other Romance languages. In Spanish and Portuguese “woman” and “wife” are often the same word, “mujer” and “mulher” respectively.
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"Wif" meant woman at the same time that "wer" meant man and "man" meant person.
Man changed to mean only a male person, and we lost wer except in the word "werewolf".