Herstoricity

“Afrika”, “herstory”, “Latinx”, “womon”, “womxn”, “womyn”: all of these words have been celebrated and irritated. Two of them have ethnic significance and all but one are clearly linked to feminism. Even “Afrika” could be linked to feminism, but that’s a longer conversation, which may nonetheless take place here. Hence this post partly belongs in the Other Place, but I’m putting it here due to its ambiguity.

I’ll go through them one by one.

“Afrika” originates from Haki R. Madhubuti, a poet of the Afrikan diaspora born in Arkansas, apparently first used in 1973. He explains the spelling thus:

I have talked about AfriKa before on here but can’t find the post. Apart from the odd spelling of “germain” in this passage, the first thing which strikes me about it is its apparent historical inaccuracy, and this is possibly one of the more important points I’d like to address here.

There are a number of theories regarding the origin of the word “Africa”. One of these is that it’s linked to “April” and “apricity”, as in “the sunny place”. It’s probably worth noting that being a whole continent, not all of Afrika is in fact sunny. Lesotho, for example, decidedly isn’t. It may also be Ancient Egyptian in origin, from “Afru-Ika”, meaning “motherland”. If this last is true, it is at least arguably accurate since until recently the consensus scientific view was that we originated on that continent and the actual species Homo sapiens is from there although the other species with which we interbred weren’t always Afrikan. It also has the merit of being a word from an Afrikan language. However, it’s also clear that if “Afru-Ika” is indeed Egyptian, it wouldn’t’ve been written with a K because the language never used Latin script, although Coptic does use an adapted Greek alphabet with some demotic Egyptian letters so if it ever did get written in Coptic, it would’ve used a Kappa. Although I thought Afrika was referred to in the Book of Acts, I can’t find any such reference, but in that same book and elsewhere, Ethiopians are mentioned, which has been one way Afrika was mentioned in Europe in the past. In Ge`ez, “the Ethiopian eunuch” is called ” ኢትዮጵያዊው ጃንደረባ”, and there’s definitely no K in that, which gives rise to one of my puzzles about this issue: Afrikan languages use all sorts of non-Latin scripts which have nothing which looks like the letter K in them. To give a very incomplete list, there are the multiple West Afrikan scripts such as Vai, the Berber script Tamazight, the Arabic abjad, the Ethiopian abugida and the various Ancient Egyptian scripts. The Coptic alphabet does include a K. It is true that the letter C is often a bit of an oddity in languages written with the Latin script because its pronunciation varies more, but it’s also the case that the idea that “Afrika” is spelt with a K edges into “not even wrong” territory because many of the scripts used for Afrikan languages aren’t even alphabets and don’t have letters in the Latin sense, so they don’t have an equivalent for K as an isolated sound.

However, maybe this is not the point, and I could of course launch into a further tirade on the history of the word’s spelling, noting that in particular “Afrika” is the German and Afrikaans spelling, and I’m guessing also the Flemish one, which opens a horrifying chapter in Afrikan colonial history. It’s factually incorrect that no European language other than Dutch and German has the hard C sound, so this inaccuracy bothers me. I’m also far from convinced that most Afrikan languages spell it with a K, and if they do whether those are widely spoken or otherwise used languages, although majority languages do have issues of their own. These are, though, not the only points Madhubuti raises. The K can symbolise Afrikans “coming back together again” without there needing to be an historical (very aware of that word too right now) justification. After all, the uses of the X in “Latinx” and “womxn” are not historical and that may not matter.

The third reason given feels like something I’m not qualified to comment on since I’m neither Afrikan nor part of the Afrikan diaspora. It comes from a Pan-Africanist approach, significantly a global movement which stresses common ground and mutual support by all people of Afrikan heritage within and outwith the Afrikan continent, focussing on the latter via the slave trade. The four words used have different sources, being respectively from (ki?)Swahili, Akan (actually Nkrumah), Swahili again and West Afrika. Now I recognise that because all of these cultures are Black, they may be unified by the effect of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, but I’m also not sure as the world’s Whitest person whether unifying those concepts under the same heading is positive or negative. Madhubati then builds on that by saying that using the K is a sign of an Afrikan lingua franka, an interesting subversion of Latin which introduces a K into a language which rarely uses it. I feel also that I should point out that a basically nullifying version of the idea of the Afrikan diaspora would include me in two senses as part of it. One of these is the trivial and probably annoying observation that all living humans have Afrikan heritage because our species is from Afrika. The other is the slightly less trivial but still quite appropriative fact that I actually do have recent Afrikan ancestry, but this has little to no bearing on my Whiteness because nowadays I am practically universally perceived as White, which does in fact make me White, and in fact very White indeed.

On the subject of Latin, the word “Africa” itself was initially used by the Romans to refer to a province of the Empire on the southern Mediterranean coast. This was in a sense another form of colonialism, so the use of the C there is equally colonialist except that it was imposing on the Phoenician script used there at the time. There is a bit of a side-issue about whether Roman imperialism was similar to the later European version, and the issue of slavery in the Roman Empire is also different to that of the Atlantic slave trade, but I’ve already gone on about this a fair bit so I’ll stop at this point and move on to another.

The main issue here may be that it isn’t the history that matters. When we use words in everyday life, we usually don’t pay much attention to their etymology or shift in meaning. The word “nice”, as I’ve said, is one of several words which change their meaning regularly, along with “silly” and “gay”. These all have overlapping meanings from time to time, and a fourth associate member of this group is “blessed”. We do tend to focus on these more than most others because they’re unusually fluid, but on the whole we don’t. Likewise, the word “necklace”, with many others, has an obvious form which can be broken down to reveal an older meaning, but we seldom consider this. This is because, on the whole, words interact with each other and are used in a contemporary way and their etymology is not the central issue. “Afrika” with a K may or may not have historicity.

Or herstoricity? What would that even mean? To state a very obvious and widely known fact, “history” is etymologically from the Latin word “historia”, itself from the Greek ἱστορία, and is linked to the word “story”. The Latin third person feminine and masculine possessive adjective (their analogue to our “her” and “his”) is “sua”, which varies according to the possessed thing and not the gender of the possessor. Hence there is very clearly no etymological link between the word “history” and “his”. However, this is almost irrelevant because to someone who knows English, it sounds like “his story” and an informative play on words can emphasise that history is written by the winners, i.e. men. That said, the Romance languages assign their word for “history” to the feminine, as “historia” is a feminine noun ending in A in the singular nominative.

“Herstory” first seems to have been used in 1970 by Robin Morgan. It’s been criticised by Richard Dawkins along the lines of its etymology, which as I’ve said is irrelevant because language is rarely used that way. Others regard it as a falsification of history because it allegedly emphasises certain things unrealistically and distorts the story. There have also been women historians before the twentieth century, whose expressed views tend to be those of men historians. It could also be criticised as insufficiently intersectional: is it perhaps the herstory of White women, for example? How much herstory is seen from a Latinx perspective?

“Latinx” is mainly a New World-centred concept. The X is there because some Romance languages tend to gender the adjective and adjectival noun “Latina”/”Latino” for women and girls on the one hand and men and boys on the other. In general, over most extensive texts or speeches, a person referring to themselves in such a language will reveal their gender because this is how they work grammatically. There seems also to be a weaker tendency than in some other languages with grammatical gender to ascribe genders inconsistently, as used to happen in English with “woman” being masculine and “wife” neuter. Hence the X. However, there’s a separate issue here which might also come into play with the issue of pan-Africanism. It seems to this White person typing this, whose ethnicity might mean that pan-Africanism glosses over important cultural and other differences among Afrikans which might be important, and “Latinx” seems to do the same.

“Latinx” is a term coined in the early 21st century CE. The idea is partly to avoid the forced self-gendering of using the equivalent words ending in A and O, and I think to an extent to be gender-neutral when referring to someone. It is, however, rather controversial for a couple of reasons. One is that it could be culturally imperialist because it seems to have been coined by Anglophones and doesn’t work in the actual languages themselves. Another is that it refers to a whole swathe of people who may not see themselves as similar at all and seems to exclude other people whom one might think are included such as Spaniards, Portuguese, the French, Swiss and Walloons, people from Angola and Mozambique, Cajuns and Quebecois. Within the “Hispanic” community there are also native Americans, Sephardic Jews and people of mainly European descent. This is parallel in some ways to the “Afrika with a K” situation, since Afrika is the second largest continent with a host of ethnicities and nations and the idea seems to have started outside it. The majority of “Latinx” people in the US dislike the term and possibly consider it racist. I’m not sure what womyn think about it.

I’m going to consider the three “wom*n” terms together. “Womon” and “womyn” are older and linked. The idea behind these is to remove the morphemes “man” and “men” from the word for women, for want of a better word. The first is singular, the other plural. “Wimmin” is also used for the plural, and “womban” is found sometimes. Etymologically this is naïve because the etymology of “woman” is “wifman”, i.e. “person who is a woman” and there are cis women born without wombs, cis women with more than one womb and cis women who have had hysterectomies, so “wombman” could be seen as reducing “women” to their reproductive systems and is quite tactless as well. However, the latter is more important than the former, as it’s clear that etymology is not particularly important most of the time. There are also a couple of extinct words for men which are formed in a similar way, namely “ƿerman” (“person who is a man”) and “ƿæpman” (“person whose role is to bear a weapon”). These died out because of the sexist assumption that “man” is the default. I have to admit that recently I’ve watched quite a few programmes with werewolves in them and noticed that whereas I definitely think of the word “werewolf” as masculine, most people seem not to notice the incongruity of using it for women, when a better word might be “wifewolf” or the apparently gender-neutral “lycanthrope”. This etymological thicket is, though, more interesting than influential.

The word “wimmin” is older and not deliberately coined. It’s been used as part of spelling reform, as “women” is an accurate depiction of neither the morphemes nor the etymology of the word, and is also used in a mocking way to indicate that the speaker or writer is uneducated. For instance, it gets used in Popeye comic strips. As such it’s unlike the others, which originated in 1976 in connection with the now-controversial Michigan Womyn’s Festival. It tends to be associated with lesbian separatism, a movement which has now become unpopular because it’s seen as faking lesbianism, and because of this is now rather an obscure pair of words. I don’t know if this has ever been done, but a back-formation would be possible using the words “mon” and “myn” for men. “Mon” already existed in Anglo-Saxon times and is of course also found, with no direct historical connection, in Afro-Caribbean English. There’s potential for “mon” and “myn” to mean something like “person with a penis”, unlike “womxn”.

“Womxn”, the final of many, though perhaps less prominent, examples of this mentioned here, has an intention which might be seen as athwart “womon”, although when it was invented in the 1970s the two were similar. However, it didn’t become at all popular until the late ‘teens, by which time it was in opposition to “womon” in attempting to include both cis and trans women. Since I try to avoid discussing gender identity issues on here, that’s all I’m going to say about it.

To conclude, I’ll try to extract some common themes, using bullet points:

• Etymology is largely irrelevant to these neologisms.
• There is often resistance to them.
• It can be a futile exercise to change language, but it can also succeed. The word “quiz” is a possible example of a word introduced deliberately, but I don’t think it was already given a meaning.
• These linguistic elements can have a slacktivist tendency, serving as substitutes for something which takes deeper thought, effort and dialogue.
• Sometimes these coinages are imposed from without and have an appropriative flavour.

To be honest, I don’t know what I think, and that’s probably because of my privilege. If I were on the other side of some of these moves, I might be able to judge them more fairly. As it is, in most ways my identity is that of the oppressor. Also, viewing a group from a distance and without fully authentic and lived experience can lead to an apparent homogenisation, as seems to be reflected in “Afrika” and “Latinx”, and perhaps others.