Names_for_the_human_species

Names for the human species

Names for the human species

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In addition to the generally accepted taxonomic name Homo sapiens (Latin: 'wise man', Linnaeus 1758), other Latin-based names for the human species have been created to refer to various aspects of the human character.

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The common name of the human species in English is historically man (from Germanic mann), often replaced by the Latinate human (since the 16th century).

In the world's languages

The Indo-European languages have a number of inherited terms for mankind. The etymon of man is found in the Germanic languages, and is cognate with Manu, the name of the human progenitor in Hindu mythology, and found in Indic terms for man (including manuṣya, manush, and manava).

Latin homo is derived from the Indo-European root dʰǵʰm- "earth", as it were "earthling". It has cognates in Baltic (Old Prussian zmūi), Germanic (Gothic guma) and Celtic (Old Irish duine). This is comparable to the explanation given in the Genesis narrative to the Hebrew Adam (אָדָם) "man", derived from a word for "red, reddish-brown". Etymologically, it may be an ethnic or racial classification (after "reddish" skin colour contrasting with both "white" and "black"), but Genesis takes it to refer to the reddish colour of earth, as in the narrative the first man is formed from earth.[2]

Other Indo-European languages name man for his mortality, *mr̥tós meaning "mortal", so in Armenian mard, Persian mard, Sanskrit marta and Greek βροτός meaning "mortal; human". This is comparable to the Semitic word for "man", represented by Arabic insan إنسان (cognate with Hebrew ʼenōš אֱנוֹשׁ‬), from a root for "sick, mortal".[3] The Arabic word has been influential in the Islamic world, and was adopted in many Turkic languages. The native Turkic word is kiši.[4]

Greek ἄνθρωπος (anthropos) is of uncertain, possibly pre-Greek origin.[5] Slavic čelověkъ also is of uncertain etymology.[6]

The Chinese character used in East Asian languages is 人, originating as a pictogram of a human being. The reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation of the Chinese word is /ni[ŋ]/.[7] A Proto-Sino-Tibetan r-mi(j)-n gives rise to Old Chinese /*miŋ/, modern Chinese 民 mín "people" and to Tibetan མི mi "person, human being".

In some tribal or band societies, the local endonym is indistinguishable from the word for "men, human beings". Examples include: Ainu ainu, Inuktitut: inuk, Bantu: bantu, Khoekhoe: khoe-khoe, possibly in Uralic: Hungarian magyar, Mansi mäńćī, mańśi, from Proto-Ugric *mańć- "man, person".[citation needed]

In philosophy

The mixture of serious and tongue-in-cheek self-designation originates with Plato, who on one hand defined man taxonomically as a "featherless biped",[8][9] and on the other as ζῷον πολιτικόν (zōon politikon), as "political" or "state-building animal" (Aristotle's term, based on Plato's Statesman).

Harking back to Plato's zōon politikon are a number of later descriptions of man as an animal with a certain characteristic. Notably animal rationabile "animal capable of rationality", a term used in medieval scholasticism (with reference to Aristotle), and also used by Carl Linnaeus (1760)[citation needed] and Immanuel Kant (1798).[citation needed] Based on the same pattern are animal sociale or "social animal",[according to whom?][year needed] animal laborans "laboring animal" (Hannah Arendt 1958[10]), and animal symbolicum "symbolizing animal" (Ernst Cassirer 1944).

Taxonomy

The binomial name Homo sapiens was coined by Carl Linnaeus (1758).[11] Names for other human species were introduced beginning in the second half of the 19th century (Homo neanderthalensis 1864, Homo erectus 1892).

There is no consensus on the taxonomic delineation between human species, human subspecies and the human races. On the one hand, there is the proposal that H. sapiens idaltu (2003) is not distinctive enough to warrant classification as a subspecies.[12] On the other, there is the position that genetic variation in the extant human population is large enough to justify its division into several subspecies.[citation needed] Linneaeus (1758) proposed division into five subspecies, H. sapiens europaeus alongside H. s. afer, H. s. americanus and H. s. asiaticus for Europeans, Africans, Americans and Asians. This convention remained commonly observed until the mid-20th century, sometimes with variations or additions such as H. s. tasmanianus for Australians.[13] The conventional division of extant human populations into taxonomic subspecies was gradually abandoned beginning in the 1970s.[14] Similarly, there are proposals to classify Neanderthals[15] and Homo rhodesiensis as subspecies of H. sapiens, although it remains more common to treat these last two as separate species within the genus Homo rather than as subspecies within H. sapiens.[16]

List of binomial names

The following names mimic binomial nomenclature, mostly consisting of Homo followed by a Latin adjective characterizing human nature. Most of them were coined since the mid 20th century in imitation of Homo sapiens in order to make some philosophical point (either serious or ironic), but some go back to the 18th to 19th century, as in Homo aestheticus vs. Homo oeconomicus; Homo loquens is a serious suggestion by Herder, taking the human species as defined by the use of language;[17] Homo creator is medieval, coined by Nicolaus Cusanus in reference to man as imago Dei.

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In fiction

In fiction, specifically science fiction and fantasy, occasionally names for the human species are introduced reflecting the fictional situation of humans existing alongside other, non-human civilizations. In science fiction, Earthling (also Terran, Earther, and Gaian) is frequently used, as it were naming humanity by its planet of origin. Incidentally, this situation parallels the naming motive of ancient terms for humanity, including human (homo, humanus) itself, derived from a word for "earth" to contrast earth-bound humans with celestial beings (i.e. deities) in mythology.

See also


References

  1. Groves, C. P. (2005). Wilson, D. E.; Reeder, D. M. (eds.). Mammal Species of the World: A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference (3rd ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-801-88221-4. OCLC 62265494.
  2. Strong's Concordance H852, H605.
  3. Starostin, Sergei; Dybo, Anna; Mudrak, Oleg (2003), *k`i̯uĺe in: Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages (Handbuch der Orientalistik; VIII.8), Leiden, New York, Köln: E.J. Brill (starling.rinet.ru).
  4. Romain Garnier proposed another etymology in his 2007 article "Nouvelles réflexions étymologiques autour du grec ἄνθρωπος", deriving it from Proto-Indo-European *n̥dʰreh₃kʷó- ('that which is below'), hence "earthly, human".
  5. its first element čelo- may be cognate with Sanskrit kula- "family, sept; herd"; the second element -věkъ may be cognate with Latvian vaiks, Lithuanian vaĩkas "boy, child". Max Vasmer, Russisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (1950–58).
  6. Baxter-Sagart reconstruction of Old Chinese (Version 1.1, 20 September 2014)
  7. Plato (1975) [1925]. "The Statesman". Plato in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation. Vol. VIII (The Statesman, Philebus, Ion). Translated by Harold N[orth] Fowler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann. pp. 40–41. ISBN 978-0-674-99182-8. λέγω δὴ δεῖν τότε εὐθὺς τὸ πεζὸν τῷ δίποδι πρὸς τὸ τετράπουν γένος διανεῖμαι, κατιδόντα δὲ τἀνθρώπινον ἔτι μόνῳ τῷ πτηνῷ συνειληχὸς τὴν δίποδα ἀγέλην πάλιν τῷ ψιλῷ καὶ τῷ πτεροφυεῖ τέμνειν, [...] [I say, then, that we ought at that time to have divided walking animals immediately into biped and quadruped, then seeing that the human race falls into the same division with the feathered creatures and no others, we must again divide the biped class into featherless and feathered, [...]]
  8. Plato defined a human as a featherless, biped animal and was applauded. Diogenes of Sinope plucked a chicken and brought it into the lecture hall, saying: "Here is Plato's human!", Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Philosophers 6.40
  9. Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958
  10. Linné, Carl von (1758). Systema naturæ. Regnum animale (10 ed.). pp. 18, 20. Retrieved 19 November 2012.. Note: In 1959, Linnaeus was designated as the lectotype for Homo sapiens (Stearn, W. T. 1959. "The background of Linnaeus's contributions to the nomenclature and methods of systematic biology", Systematic Zoology 8 (1): 4-22, p. 4) which means that following the nomenclatural rules, Homo sapiens was validly defined as the animal species to which Linnaeus belonged.
  11. "Human evolution: Out of Ethiopia". Macmillan Publishers Limited. June 12, 2003. Retrieved June 7, 2016. "Herto skulls (Homo sapiens idaltu)". talkorigins org. Retrieved June 7, 2016.
  12. See e.g. John Wendell Bailey, The Mammals of Virginia (1946), p. 356.; Journal of Mammalogy 26-27 (1945), p. 359.; J. Desmond Clark (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, Cambridge University Press (1982), p. 141 (with references).
  13. e.g. Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia, Volume 11, p. 55.
  14. Hublin, J. J. (2009). "The origin of Neandertals". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 106 (38): 16022–7. Bibcode:2009PNAS..10616022H. doi:10.1073/pnas.0904119106. JSTOR 40485013. PMC 2752594. PMID 19805257. Harvati, K.; Frost, S.R.; McNulty, K.P. (2004). "Neanderthal taxonomy reconsidered: implications of 3D primate models of intra- and interspecific differences". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101 (5): 1147–52. Bibcode:2004PNAS..101.1147H. doi:10.1073/pnas.0308085100. PMC 337021. PMID 14745010.
  15. "Homo neanderthalensis King, 1864". Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. 2013. pp. 328–331.
  16. Compare alalus "incapable of speech" as the species name given to Java Man fossil, at the time (1895) taken to reflect a pre-human stage of "ape-man" (Pithecanthropus). Herder's Homo loquens was parodied by Henri Bergson (1943) as Homo loquax i.e. Man as chattering or overly talkative.
  17. Alexander Schmemann in 1973, in his book For the Life of the World. This theme is picked up by Dr. James Jordan at the Biblical Horizon Institute, and Dr. Peter Leithart in New Saint Andrews College.
  18. Romeo (1979), p. 4.
  19. "Humberto Maturana, Metadesign, part III August 1, 1997". Archived from the original on May 11, 2015. Retrieved January 21, 2016.
  20. while in classical Latin, homo avarus means simply "someone greedy" Romeo (1979), p. 15.
  21. Language in Cognition: Uncovering Mental Structures and the Rules Behind Them, Wiley Blackwell (ISBN 978-1-4051-5882-4)
  22. Romeo (1979), p. 29; both homo contaminatus and homo inquinatus are found in Cicero as descriptions of individuals.
  23. Romeo (1979), p. 8.
  24. Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance, Seven Stories Press (ISBN 1-58322-724-5).
  25. Deely and Nogar (1973), pages 149 and 312, cited after Romeo (1979), p. 18.
  26. "Homo Hypocritus". Overcoming bias.
  27. Hart, David Bentley. (2021). Roland in Moonlight. Angelico. Page 231.
  28. Supiot, Alain. (2007). Homo Juridicus: On the Anthropological Function of the Law. Verso.
  29. Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. 2016. Pages 57-59 (among other places).
  30. Walter R. Fisher, 'Narration as a Human Communication paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument', Communication Monographs, 51 (1984), 1-20 Archived 2018-12-22 at the Wayback Machine doi:10.1080/03637758409390180 [repr. in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, ed. by John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999) pp. 265-87 (p. 270)].
  31. Greaney, Michael (2016). "Laziness: A Literary-Historical Perspective". The Restless Compendium. pp. 183–190. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-45264-7_22. ISBN 978-3-319-45263-0.
  32. Milner, G. B. (1972). "Homo Ridens. Towards a Semiotic Theory of Humour and Laughter". Semiotica. 5 (1): 1–30. doi:10.1515/semi.1972.5.1.1. S2CID 170413096.
  33. http://www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/homo.pdf Homo reciprocans: A Research Initiative on the Origins, Dimensions, and Policy Implications of Reciprocal Fairness
  34. "Homo Sanguinis Versus Homo Sapiens: Mankind's Present Dilemma". Journal of the National Medical Association. 61 (5): 437–439. 1969. PMC 2611676.
  35. Homo Symbolicus: The dawn of language, imagination and spirituality: Amazon.co.uk: Henshilwood, Christopher S., d'Errico, Francesco: 9789027211897: Books. ASIN 9027211892.
  36. Gingras, Yves (2005). Éloge de l'homo techno-logicus. Saint-Laurent, QC: Les Editions Fides. ISBN 2-7621-2630-4.

Further reading

  • Luigi Romeo, Ecce Homo!: A Lexicon of Man, John Benjamins Publishing, 1979.

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