According to one etymology, Proto-Germanic *man-n- is derived from a Proto-Indo-European root *man-, *mon- or *men- (see Sanskrit/Avestan manu-, Slavic mǫž "man, male").
[citation needed] In Hindu mythology, Manu is the name of the traditional progenitor of humankind who survives a deluge and gives mankind laws.
AD 70 to be the name of a traditional ancestor of the Germanic peoples and son of Tuisto; modern sources other than Tacitus have reinterpreted this as "first man".
[5] In Old English the words wer and wīf were used to refer to "a male" and "a female" respectively, while mann had the primary meaning of "person" or "human" regardless of gender.
Both wer and wyf may be used to qualify "man"; for example: God gesceop ða æt fruman twegen men, wer and wif (then at the beginning, God created two human beings, man and woman)[6]These terms are also used to qualify compounds; wifmann (variant wimman) developed into the modern word "woman".
Moreover, according to Brugmann's law, Sanskrit mánu, with its short a, implies a PIE reconstruction *menu- rather than *monu-, which would lead to an expected but not attested cognate **minn- in Proto-Germanic.
[14] The same thing has happened to the Latin word homo: in most of the Romance languages, homme, uomo, hombre, homem have come to refer mainly to males, with a residual generic meaning.
With social changes in the later 20th century, new gender-neutral terms were coined, such as "firefighter", "police officer", and "mail carrier", to redress the gender-specific connotations of occupational names.
[19] Also, in American English, the expression "The Man", referring to "the oppressive powers that be", originated in the Southern United States in the 20th century, and became widespread in the urban underworld from the 1950s.
Between the late 2000s and early 2010s, man- was introduced as a prefix to terms such as mansplaining or manspreading in feminist jargon to denounce sexist attitudes "that have historically gone unnoticed".