Alex2018 пишет: ↑24 апр 2019, 07:49
There was a man/a human being... человек\человеческое существо
What is _man/_human being? люди\человеческая раса
Можно, наверное, и так сказать.
Там
два пересекающихся употребления _man - без артикля:
1) а) человек б) человеческий род, человечество
2) мужчина
2) - может быть и с неопределенным артиклем, и во мн.ч.: Woman is man's best friend = a man's = men's
1) - иногда с большой буквы; воспринимается некоторыми, как сексистское высказывание (When did man first land on the Moon?)
Но этот феминистский пафос доходит до абсурда, когда ретивые борцуны с дискриминацией объявляют крестовый поход против трёх букв, усматривая "самца" даже в словах вроде manicure, manipulate, manoeuvre, manual, manufacture, manuscript - которые, конечно же, к агрессивной маскулинности не имеют отношения.
Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1998)
man Man in its generic sense "a human being" has come under considerable attack in recent years by people who feel that because it is so widely understood in
its somewhat more recent sense of "a male person," its generic sense slights women. This is not an unreasonable objection; however, the replacement of this generic man has been slowed by some mild resistance to replacing it with the four-syllable human being and greater, if less comprehensible, resistance to the two-syllable
human. (For more on the human-human being controversy, see HUMAN.) Human and human being are making some progress as replacements on the schoolbook
level; however, when we see them being used in place of Man by the intellectual elite of religion, science, and philosophy—those who deal with problems of cosmic
dimension and treat everything in the large—we will know we have seen a successful revolution.
You, in the meantime, can use human or human being or even person if you dislike the generic man. Or you can keep on using man. One way or the other, you will probably please someone and displease another. You will find longer discussions in McMahan & Day 1980, 1984, Reader's Digest 1983, Irmscher 1976, and other handbooks, as well as in books that deal extensively with the questions of gender and sexism in English, such as Dennis Baron's Grammar and Gender (1986), Rosalie Maggio's The Nonsexist Word Finder (1987), and Casey Miller and Kate Swift's Words and Women (1976). Some of these also take up the matter of compounds with -man {policeman, fireman, etc.), which in this book are covered at SEXISM 1.