>>36
In my culture it was more like women and children are inside of interest and men are to work from outside and make sure that they are safe.
So your culture exhibits the same patriarchal tendencies you're objecting to in English. I notice you also mention traditional gender roles being embedded in your language itself:
It is quite often that masculine objects are less harder, more dangerous or just uglier than feminine ones. It separates the whole word in two categories plus who neutral objects. We got feminine hen and masculine rooster plus neutral egg because it can become either. We got feminine birch and feminine willow but masculine oak, because of it hard wood as opposed to former two. We got even feminine mouse and masculine rat. It really is much more than practical use. It is the whole concept of universe. It gives something like a soul to every object and a lot more.
I'm the first to agree that gender-neutral language is a good thing. It's true that English is a little sexist, but so are most languages. Certainly I would say English is less sexist as a whole than a language that encodes gender identities in its nouns. The language is less sexist than its average speaker.
It is just that when you learn English then you start to wonder why there is this title "The Descent of Man" and not "The Descent of Human" which is also a little sexist as it is hu-man.
You're confusing Latin borrowings through Old French with the word “man”. English is not a philosophical language, and not every word with the syllable “man” in it involves the same concept. Uses of man to mean mankind are older than its use to mean a male human. It's unfortunate that it got co-opted to refer to males (which speaks volumes about the medieval mindset).