What is a Woman (or a Man) So, 'what is a woman'? Or, 'what is a man'? I guess there are no hard and fast answers to these questions. You see, the concepts 'man' and 'woman' were part of the English language, and indeed part of every language in the world, well before humans had given any thoughts to define things clearly. Historically, the need to define things absolutely clearly came with the development of things like modern legal systems and scientific study. However, human civilization had a long history before these developments. And it is in these ancient times that the concepts of 'men' and 'women' arose.
Before what we could call modern academic thinking emerged, the way human beings understood things, especially natural phenomenon, was mostly by perception, and comparing to what they already knew. Hence, a 'man' was what people perceived as similar to other men they had known, and a 'woman' was what people perceived as similar to other women they had known. There was no 'definition', in the modern sense, to speak of. We also have to remember that perception is necessarily subjective to some extent, which means its application to borderline cases could vary between observers. (However, in ancient times, people generally lived in smaller and more isolated communities, and they weren't likely to come across borderline cases, so it wasn't much of a problem.) Hence, any rule that claims to be able to objectively and reliably classify borderline cases as 119
