I've been brushing up on Biblical Hebrew lately, and experiencing sympathy pangs for those poor souls studying for their bar mitzvahs (bar mitzvot?).
The most common words of a language tend to preserve irregularities long past the death of their conjugational companions. In olden days, of course, these were not irregularities, but perfectly sensible in the systems of their birth. The erosion of the years and the reform of their now-wayword companions leave them orphaned and oddities which frustrate the beginning student and fascinate the linguistically savvy mind. From the multitude of en-dings for Anglo-Saxon plurals, only "children" remains a once-common "-en" ending, and throws an "r" in the mix for good measure. Seldom do comtemporary English speakers refer to "oxen", and even those who might use "brethren" are more likely to say "brothers".
It is no surprise that the Hebrew words for "man" and "woman" display such irregularities, The plural of "ish" "man" is "anashim" and plural of "ishsha" is "nashim." The missing nun in "ish" and "ishsha" vanished through assimilation to the previous consonants, and the missing aleph in "nashim" proabably disappeared through its own weakness (I don't think the aleph is an addition, as some might, for reasons I explain below). The three-letter root, then would be aleph-nun-shin. If scholars who have dedicated their lives to the study of the Semitic languages cannot agree on the distribution of the various sibilants (s-sounds) in proto-Semitic, certainly I dare not do so. My suspicion is that the root originally meant "man or human being", and thus, according to the usual androcentricity of gender systems, declined as a masculine. The feminine meaning is probably derivative, and the bewildering multiplicity of "broken plurals" in Arabic, traditionally considered the most conservative of the Semitic languages, allows for odd plural patterns preserved in the much more orderly Hebrew. The root aleph-nun-"s", however, could extend much further back: the basic proto-Indo-European root for "man" is "H1ner", in which the "H1" represents one of the famous laryngeals, possibly a glottal stop, that is, an aleph. The speakers of Indo-European apparently treated "H1ner" as exclusively masculine, but struggled to make it fir into the later declensional patterns. In this case, at least, it seems that :"woman" really is called "woman" because she was created from "man"!
