Male-female, man-woman, husband-wife

In English, we pair words, sometimes exclusively. Other languages may not have such well-defined pairs.

With respect to male-female, what is male or female in Hebrew may be signaled simply by the presence or absence of a suffix. So when I look at my English glossary I find:

male(88) זכר, male barren(1) עקר, male consternation(1) להה, male foal(3) בן, male juvenile(1) ילד, male kid(11) גדי, male newborn(2) ילד, male peer(6) ילד, male servant(3) עבד, male singer(3) שירׁ, male slave(8) עבד.

I have been forced to use male as an adjective. Similarly for female: female(22) נקב, female barren(1) עקר, female juvenile(1) ילד, female servant(3) שפחהׁ, female singer(3) שירׁ, female slave(9) שפחהׁ.

But there is here a male-female pair, זכר and נקב. When these appear together, it is with deliberate intent in the Hebrew language to differentiate the two genders. But if I look in the Hebrew-English glossary I see that each of these has other glosses as well. These other glosses are not what I might have expected. It seems to me that the male is one who remembers זכר and the female is associated with piercing or drilling נקב and certain forms of tool like pick-ax and hammer.

With husband-wife, I avoided husband for the very common stem אישׁ, but I allowed wife for the equally common stem אשׁה.

אישׁ man (524) person (396) men (363) each (318) anyone (82) soldier (61) everyone (56) -- (54) -one (31) such (10) adult (8) representative (6) another (4) other (3) personal (3) cohort (1) every (1) every person (1) hero (1) real (1) ride (1) someone (1) spouse (1) there (1)
אשׁה wife (408) woman (238) women (121) each (10) mate (2)

These clearly sound like a pairing ish, ishah. One might think these were the stems for man-woman. And indeed they can be. But אישׁ is both generic and more multi-faceted than אשׁה. At least it seems I have treated it so. (I also have some artificial hapaxes here, uniquely used glosses created by the process of translation.)

And either of these might just be rendered as each. This gloss breaks my rules, but I don't enforce them for some pronouns, and most prepositions, conjunctions and other grammatical particles.

I allowed husband for the stem בעל Baal. This stem also covers a lot of ground: Baal (107) owner (41) superior (26) husband (22) Baalim (18) marry (12) Husband (2) own (2) owed (1) owns (1) senior (1).

[Aside, owed stands out here as out of place. It occurs only in Nehemiah 6:18. It being less than 5 characters, it might have escaped my net, but I never used owing or owe or owes anywhere else.]

Now it appears that husband-wife do not behave like their English equivalents. So the question is, should I avoid using the word wife at all? Imagine reading woman/women for every occurrence of wife/wives. It is awkward for me, though common in some English language enclaves. But if I use wife, I must not read modern cultural monogamy into the word. Nor should I read a 16th century ownership paradigm into it. Nonetheless, it appears that wife is defined as a woman with whom the man has had coitus. Perhaps this is a legitimate assumption and an acceptable rationale for using one gloss over another for the same stem. All translators make such decisions, sometimes consciously, sometimes not.

Traditional translations are nowhere near as strict as I have been. Here's a quick glance at man, husband, women, wife in the King James version: man is used for אדם, אישׁ, זכר, בעל just for starters. It also appears frequently as an adjective (for the Hebrew suffix). Husband is used for אישׁ, חתן, and בעל. Wife is more consistent as אשׁה. But woman is used for both אשׁה and נקב. With most stems I have avoided these overlaps.

[Aside, I have allowed marry to overlap two stems (though they are easy to distinguish). First it is used for בעל, as in this double usage: וְהִ֖וא בְּעֻ֥לַת בָּֽעַל, for she is married to a husband. And I used intermarry for the stem חתן, which my algorithm did not break down to marry. This stem is a generic 'in-law' stem: father-in-law (20) son-in-law (12) bridegroom (11) in-law (4) intermarry (4) alliance (2) brother-in-law (1).]

More to come on multi-faceted words.