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Curiously, in Mandarin Chinese "A Chinese Person" is "zhongoa ren". Literally translated as "China" (Zhongoa) Man" (ren)
中国 人
中国 人
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JCOSU86;885247; said:
Yes, it does, but it's still the character for "person"...there is a seperate character for "man" (male adult). In English, we use "man" as a suffix added to root words to create generic terms: "policeman", "fireman", "spokesman" (military), etc. When these words were created, it was the exclusive domain of males and thus using "man" as a suffix made sense then, instead of using a non-gender suffix such as "er" ("worker", "speaker", etc.). Although the terms came to cover females in the same occupation (justifying so by saying the "man" suffix was gender-neutral in the same regard as you pointed out above), many feminists complained simply because "man" was part of the word and implied a male position.
In Japanese along as in Chinese, virtually all terms use either the standard character for "person" (as in your example) or another character ("sha") meaning "person", as suffixes to create positions/jobs/descriptions, even for those that were/are exclusively male. Even the term for a White person ("caucasian") uses those two characters: The one for "white", and the one for "person". Their word for a Black person follows the exact format: "black: and "person".
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