No, “Son” as in “male child” is derived from Porto-Germanic “Sunnus”, “person” as in “human being” is derived from Latin “persona”. It’s just a coincidence that in modern English we write them with the same characters.
There are some (fringe?) groups who'd argue against this, evidenced by variant spellings like "womxn" and "womyn" that are attested since the 70s, in order to remove "man" from the words. Different in that "woman" is etymologically an extension of the word "man", but somewhat absurd because the etymological root was gender neutral, with a separate word attested for "masculine" man.
Point being, perception of a word can be more meaningful to some people than the historical meaning.
Good 'ole prescriptive vs descriptive linguistics...
This kind of thinking, linguistic relativity - that the words available to you shape your worldview - is not really held in high regard as I understand it. At least not in the hard sense, where one is completely unable to conceptualise something because they don't have the words to express it.
For example, some have claimed that if we had no separate terms for "man and woman", "male and female", etc, we'd be unable to perceive a difference between the two.
> the etymological root was gender neutral, with a separate word attested for "masculine" man
For anyone playing at home, this is "were" or "wer". The phrase "man and woman" would once have been something like "were and wif", which is where the "were-" in "werewolf" comes from, and is the ancestor of "wife".
If we want English to be more gender-neutral, we could revert to werman, wifman and man.
Oh, for sure. I didn't mean to suggest it's a common or respected belief, only that there are some who support it.
(and probably more who use examples of it in bad faith arguments presuming that such groups exist in larger numbers, e.g. "look at those crazy feminists!")
> If we want English to be more gender-neutral, we could revert to werman, wifman and man.
There's a part of me that loves this idea, even if I recognize the absurdity of suggesting it. I guess it's made more sense to me than trying to replace a large portion of English vocab en masse, like all the vocational terms ending in "-man".
A curious example of a Germanic cousin of English that underwent the same "masculinization" of the word man but "came back" is Swedish, where the word "man" means "adult male", but is also used as a neuter pronoun meaning "generic person" (usually translated as "one" in English).
As far as I know the other Nordic languages didn't develop this usage, but I'm less familiar with them.
> A curious example of a Germanic cousin of English that underwent the same "masculinization" of the word man but "came back" is Swedish, where the word "man" means "adult male", but is also used as a neuter pronoun meaning "generic person" (usually translated as "one" in English).
We sort of have this in English too: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind". Although I can't think of any cases where we use "man" alone to mean "one".
In my native language (Ukrainian), the word "person" (людина) is always feminine. Even if someone wanted to say "I'm a very masculine person", they would still need to use a feminine form of the word "masculine" to say "masculine person". And no one has ever had any issues with that, ever.
In Italian (which shares I believe no common roots with Ukrainan) it is the same, "person" (persona) is always feminine, and of course goes with feminine articles and adjectives are conjugated at the feminine gender and as well noone ever had issues with that.
