1896: Man and One: Nouns and Pronouns Feb 23, 2020

Across the Indo-European languages, there is often a relation between words meaning 'man' and words for the pronoun 'one'. This can be seen clearly in the German with 'man' ('one') and 'Mann' ('man'). However, the order of which form derived from the other is not universal across these languages. In German, as in French, the pronoun stemmed from the noun, but in English, 'man' was an indefinite pronoun centuries before it was a noun.

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