Talk:člověk

Countability of člověk

The article is currently in the category cs:Uncountable. Admittedly, there is no such a word as člověci, which would be a natural plural. Still, there is the irregular plural lidé, so I would suppose the word is actually countable. --Daniel Polansky 13:18, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Oh, my mistake. The uncountability refers to the use in the meaning of humankind. --Daniel Polansky 13:21, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

RFV discussion: August 2015–February 2016

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člověk

Rfv-sense: "humankind"

I did not find any use of this word in the sense "humankind" and have strong doubts that it exists. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 21:54, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

As a side note, is there any reason to use "humankind" in this definition and lidstvo? As a native English speaker, I find it has an awkward, standoffishly political feel to it that humanity doesn't, even while humanity avoids the gender issues that mankind summons up? My edits to humankind summarize some of the issue.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:21, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Bare "humanity" is ambiguous since "humanity" can also mean "the quality of being benevolent", but "mankind" is also polysemous and has gender issues, as you note. What about translating the terms as "humanity (the human race)"? (Btw, I don't find anything unusual about "humankind", and judging from Google, plenty of native English speakers use it, e.g. it's the title of a PBS documentary on humans.) - -sche (discuss) 21:34, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Humankind is rarer then mankind; looking at the N-grams, it never hit half of mankind's usage, and mankind is on an upswing (as of latest data in 2008) and humankind is on a slight downturn. (I'd compare it to chairperson versus chairman, where chairperson has been stable for a couple decades, and chairman has dropped a lot (presumably to unmeasurable chair), but not for chairperson.) humankind seems more common, and it strikes me as less artificial, when it's talking about humans, Homo sapiens, and not people. E.g. "Humankind first arose on the planet 200,000 years ago" and not "I want to buy humankind a Coke!".

Yes, "humanity (the human race)" sounds great.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:18, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

I don't know any reason why "humankind" should be used in the definition instead of "mankind" or "humanity", and defer to native English speakers for what sounds most native and natural. It might be more appropriate for the purposes of translation to define the 2nd sense thus: "man (mankind; humanity)", to emphasize that "man" is probably the most suitable translation for this sense.

The sense seems to exist as a separate one, as in "člověk je mírou všech věcí" (man is the measure of all things) or "člověk míní, pánbůh mění" (man proposes, God disposes). It seems to be the sense of "man" defined in en:wikt man as "All humans collectively: mankind, humankind, humanity" and exemplified by "Whether modern, industrial man is less or more warlike than his hunter-gatherer ancestors is impossible to determine". The same distinction applied to word "man" is in Merriam-Webster between 1a and 1b[1]. Therefore, I do not think that the distinction between the uses of "člověk" in "támhle jde nějaký člověk" and "člověk je mírou všech věcí" should be abolished as separate senses. I also checked Mensch in Duden; they seem to have the mankind sense or some such as sense 1, and the sense referring to an individual as sense 2. Czech dictionaries PSJC and SSJC (now in člověk) do not seem to draw this distinction, but that seems to be a matter of a different lexicographical tradition more than anything else. I do not think there is anything to attest; the uses like "člověk je mírou všech věcí" are in widespread use. The question is whether to draw the distinction in the various manners of usage the way the English dictionaries tend to. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:17, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

• RFV passed and definition modified per Dan Polansky. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 05:41, 8 February 2016 (UTC)