No, Old Norse “maðr” and English “man” have a common ancestor in the reconstructed common Germanic stem *“mann-”; neither was loaned from the other. https://e

No, Old Norse “maðr” and English “man” have a common ancestor in the reconstructed common Germanic stem *“mann-”; neither was loaned from the other. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/mann- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... Further analysis upward is more tentative: hypothetically, the word could share a common ancestry with the Latin stem “ment-” for “mind” which would make the semantic origin of *“mann-” to be quite obvious. It is likely related to the Sanskrit stem “manu-” which indeed means either “thinking” when used adjectivially, and “human” when used substantively. Old English certainly did not loan it from Old Norse and the Old English form of the word “mann”, reflects what would be expected if it descended directly from common Germanic. The Old English words for “male” and “female” were “wer” and “wīf” respectively; Old English “wīfmann”, as in “female human” is what gave rise to modern English “woman”, and “wer” almost completely died out and only survives in “werewolf” and “world”, the latter a simplification of *“wer-old”, as in “a male's lifetime”, undergoing significant semantic shift. “wīf” is of course also the origin of modern English “wife”, but had no implication of marriage in Old English.