In addition to the generally accepted taxonomic nameHomo sapiens (Latin: 'wise man', Linnaeus 1758), other Latin-based names for the human species have been created to refer to various aspects of the human character.
The Indo-European languages have a number of inherited terms for mankind. The etymon of man is found in the Germanic languages, and is cognate with Manu, the name of the human progenitor in Hindu mythology, and found in Indic terms for man (including manuṣya, manush, and manava).
Latin homo is derived from the Indo-European root dʰǵʰm-'earth', as it were, 'earthling'. It has cognates in Baltic (Old Prussian zmūi), Germanic (Gothic guma) and Celtic (Old Irish duine). This is comparable to the explanation given in the Genesis narrative to the Hebrew Adam (אָדָם) 'man', derived from a word for 'red, reddish-brown'. Etymologically, it may be an ethnic or racial classification (after "reddish" skin colour contrasting with both "white" and "black"), but Genesis takes it to refer to the reddish colour of earth, as in the narrative the first man is formed from earth.[2]
Other Indo-European languages name man for his mortality, *mr̥tós meaning 'mortal', so in Armenian mard, Persian mard, Sanskrit marta and Greek βροτός meaning 'mortal, human'. This is comparable to the Semitic word for 'man', represented by Arabic insanإنسان (cognate with Hebrew ʼenōšאֱנוֹשׁ), from a root for 'sick, mortal'.[3] The Arabic word has been influential in the Islamic world, and was adopted in many Turkic languages. The native Turkic word is kiši.[4]
Greek ἄνθρωπος (anthropos) is of uncertain, possibly pre-Greek origin.[5] Slavic čelověkъ also is of uncertain etymology.[6]
The Chinese character used in East Asian languages is 人, originating as a pictogram of a human being. The reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation of the Chinese word is /ni[ŋ]/.[7] A Proto-Sino-Tibetan r-mi(j)-n gives rise to Old Chinese /*miŋ/, modern Chinese 民mín'people' and to Tibetan མིmi'person, human being'.
The mixture of serious and tongue-in-cheek self-designation originates with Plato, who on one hand defined man taxonomically as a "featherless biped",[8][9] and on the other as ζῷον πολιτικόν (zōon politikon), as "political" or "state-building animal" (Aristotle's term, based on Plato's Statesman).
The following names mimic binomial nomenclature, mostly consisting of Homo followed by a Latin adjective characterizing human nature. Most of them were coined since the mid 20th century in imitation of Homo sapiens in order to make some philosophical point (either serious or ironic), but some go back to the 18th to 19th century, as in Homo aestheticus vs. Homo oeconomicus; Homo loquens is a serious suggestion by Herder, taking the human species as defined by the use of language;[12]Homo creator is medieval, coined by Nicolaus Cusanus in reference to man as imago Dei.
Name
Translation
Notes
Homo absconditus
"man the inscrutable"
Soloveitchik, 1965 Lonely Man of Faith
Homo absurdus
"absurd man"
Giovanni Patriarca Homo Economicus, Absurdus, or Viator? 2014
Homo adaptabilis
"adaptable man"
Giovanni Patriarca Homo Economicus, Absurdus, or Viator? 2014
Homo adorans
"worshipping man"
Man as a worshipping agent, a servant of God or gods.[13]
Homo aestheticus
"aesthetic man"
In Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the main antagonist of Homo oeconomicus in the internal conflict tormenting the philosopher. Homo aestheticus is "man the aristocrat" in feelings and emotions.[14]Dissanayake (1992) uses the term to suggest that the emergence of art was central to the formation of the human species.
Man as in possession of an animus sive mens (a soul or mind), Heidegger (1975).[14]
Homo apathetikos
"apathetic man"
Used by Abraham Joshua Heschel in his book The Prophets to refer to the Stoic notion of the ideal human being, one who has attained apatheia.
Homo avarus
"man the greedy"
Used for man "activated by greed" by Barnett (1977).[16]
Homo combinans
"combining man"
Man as the only species that performs the unbounded combinatorial operations that underlie syntax and possibly other cognitive capacities; Cedric Boeckx 2009.[17]
Used as a term for mankind considered as human in the cultural sense, as opposed to homo biologicus, man considered as a biological species (and thus synonymous with Homo sapiens); the distinction was made in these terms by John N. Deely (1973).[24]
The human is a questioning or inquiring being, a being who not only asks questions but is capable of questioning or questing without there being an object referent for the inquiry itself and capable of ever-asking. Abraham Joshua Heschel discussed this idea in his 1965 book Who is Man? but John Bruin coined the term in his 2001 book Homo Interrogans: Questioning and the Intentional Structure of Cognition
Homo ignorans
"ignorant man"
Antonym to sciens (Bazán 1972, Romeo 1979:64)
Homo interreticulatus
"buried-within-the-rectangle man"
Used by philosopher David Bentley Hart to describe humanity lost within the screens of computers and other devices [26]
Homo investigans
"investigating man"
Human curiosity and capability to learn by deduction, Werner Luck 1976[citation needed]
Homo juridicus
"juridical man"
Homo juridicus identifies normative primacy of law, Alain Supiot, 2007.[27]
"the man who participates with others in rituals that recognize and enact meaning"
Philosopher James K. A. Smith uses this terms to describe a basic way in which humans dwell together with habitual practices that both embody and reorient us toward shared higher goods.[28]
Homo logicus
"the man who wants to understand"
Homo logicus are driven by an irresistible desire to understand how things work. By contrast, Homo sapiens have a strong desire for success. Alan Cooper, 1999
Homo loquens
"talking man"
Man as the only animal capable of language, J. G. Herder 1772, J. F. Blumenbach 1779.[citation needed]
"Novelty-loving man" and "Novelty-fearing man", respectively
coined by characters in the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson to describe two distinct types of human being: one which seeks out and embraces new ideas and situations (neophilus), and another which clings to habit and fears the new (neophobus).
Homo otiosus
"slacker man"
The 11th Edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica defines man as "a seeker after the greatest degree of comfort for the least necessary expenditure of energy". In The Restless Compendium Michael Greaney credits Sociologist Robert Stebbins with coining the term "homo otiosus" to refer to the privileged economic class of "persons of leisure", asserting that a distinctiveness of humans is that they (unlike other animals and machines) are capable of intentional laziness.[31]
A comment on human foreign relations and the increasing ability of man to wage war by anatomist W. M. Cobb in the Journal of the National Medical Association in 1969 and 1975.[34][35]
Homo sciens
"knowing man"
Used by Siger of Brabant, noted as a precedent of Homo sapiens by Bazán (1972) (Romeo 1979:128)
Homo sentimentalis
"sentimental man"
man born to a civilization of sentiment, who has raised feelings to a category of value; the human ability to empathize, but also to idealize emotions and make them servants of ideas. Milan Kundera in Immortality (1990), Eugene Halton in Bereft of Reason: On the Decline of Social Thought and Prospects for Its Renewal (1995).
Homo socius
"social man"
Man as a social being. Inherent to humans as long as they have not lived entirely in isolation. Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966).
A sarcastic and critical reference to an average conformist person in the USSR and other countries of the Eastern Bloc. The term was popularized by Soviet writer and sociologist Aleksandr Zinovyev, who wrote the book titled Homo Sovieticus.
The emergence of symbolic culture. 2011 [Editors Christopher S. Henshilwood and Francesco d'Errico, Homo Symbolicus: The dawn of language, imagination and spirituality[37][38]
Homo sympathetikos
"sympathetic man"
The term used by Abraham Joshua Heschel in his book The Prophets to refer to the prophetic ideal for humans: sympathetic feeling or sharing in the concerns of others, the highest expression of which is sharing in God's concern, feeling, or pathos.
as in contrast to Homo ares (or Homo martial): 'Mars human'[41][42]
Jocko Homo
"ape-man"
Coined and defined by Bertram Henry Shadduck in his 1924 tract Jocko-Homo Heavenbound the phrase gained prominence via the release DEVO's 1977 song "Jocko Homo".
In fiction, specifically science fiction and fantasy, occasionally names for the human species are introduced reflecting the fictional situation of humans existing alongside other, non-human civilizations. In science fiction, Earthling (also Terran, Earther, and Gaian) is frequently used, as it were naming humanity by its planet of origin. Incidentally, this situation parallels the naming motive of ancient terms for humanity, including human (homo, humanus) itself, derived from a word for 'earth' to contrast earth-bound humans with celestial beings (i.e. deities) in mythology.
^Starostin, Sergei; Dybo, Anna; Mudrak, Oleg (2003), *k`i̯uĺe in: Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages (Handbuch der Orientalistik; VIII.8), Leiden, New York, Köln: E.J. Brill (starling.rinet.ru).
^Romain Garnier proposed another etymology in his 2007 article "Nouvelles réflexions étymologiques autour du grec ἄνθρωπος", deriving it from Proto-Indo-European *n̥dʰreh₃kʷó- ('that which is below'), hence "earthly, human".
^its first element čelo- may be cognate with Sanskrit kula- "family, sept; herd"; the second element -věkъ may be cognate with Latvian vaiks, Lithuanian vaĩkas "boy, child". Max Vasmer, Russisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (1950–58).
^Baxter-Sagart reconstruction of Old Chinese (Version 1.1, 20 September 2014)
^Plato (1975) [1925]. "The Statesman". Plato in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation. Vol. VIII (The Statesman, Philebus, Ion). Translated by Harold N[orth] Fowler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann. pp. 40–41. ISBN978-0-674-99182-8. λέγω δὴ δεῖν τότε εὐθὺς τὸ πεζὸν τῷ δίποδι πρὸς τὸ τετράπουν γένος διανεῖμαι, κατιδόντα δὲ τἀνθρώπινον ἔτι μόνῳ τῷ πτηνῷ συνειληχὸς τὴν δίποδα ἀγέλην πάλιν τῷ ψιλῷ καὶ τῷ πτεροφυεῖ τέμνειν, [...] [I say, then, that we ought at that time to have divided walking animals immediately into biped and quadruped, then seeing that the human race falls into the same division with the feathered creatures and no others, we must again divide the biped class into featherless and feathered, [...]]
^Plato defined a human as a featherless, biped animal and was applauded. Diogenes of Sinope plucked a chicken and brought it into the lecture hall, saying: "Here is Plato's human!", Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Philosophers 6.40
^ abHannah Arendt. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958
^Linné, Carl von (1758). Systema naturæ. Regnum animale (10 ed.). pp. 18, 20. Retrieved 19 November 2012..
Note: In 1959, Linnaeus was designated as the lectotype for Homo sapiens (Stearn, W. T. 1959. "The background of Linnaeus's contributions to the nomenclature and methods of systematic biology", Systematic Zoology 8 (1): 4-22, p. 4) which means that following the nomenclatural rules, Homo sapiens was validly defined as the animal species to which Linnaeus belonged.
^Compare alalus "incapable of speech" as the species name given to Java Man fossil, at the time (1895) taken to reflect a pre-human stage of "ape-man" (Pithecanthropus).
Herder's Homo loquens was parodied by Henri Bergson (1943) as Homo loquax i.e. Man as chattering or overly talkative.
^Alexander Schmemann in 1973, in his book For the Life of the World. This theme is picked up by Dr. James Jordan at the Biblical Horizon Institute, and Dr. Peter Leithart in New Saint Andrews College.
^'Homo spiritualis: a comparative study of the anthropology of Johannes Tauler, Jean Gerson and Martin Luther (1509–16) in the context of their theological thought. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1969.
^Homo Symbolicus: The dawn of language, imagination and spirituality: Amazon.co.uk: Henshilwood, Christopher S., d'Errico, Francesco: 9789027211897: Books. ASIN9027211892.
^Kilgore, De Witt Douglas (30 September 2010). "Queering the Coming Race? A Utopian Historical Imperative". Queer Universes. Liverpool University Press. pp. 233–251. doi:10.5949/upo9781846313882.013. ISBN978-1-84631-388-2.
