Some fun facts showing that forms like “huper” (when not a modern-style transliteration of the Greek element “hyper-“, “over”, cognate with “super”, “über”, and “over” itself, Y being the traditional transliteration for upsilon, representing the ü sound) are not supported by the etymology, as every supposed offending “masculine” element except for one is coincidental, and even that has suffered from semantic deviation from a common-gender Mensch:

(I’d have posted the cover here of the book “Fucking Andrea Dworkin”, showing said Dworkin nude in all her brutishness, showing off her armpit hair, by A. Wyatt Mann, but it wouldn’t escape benjamin’s ever-meddling fingers. I had already softened the word from the drunken Burks original – left untouched – but that wasn’t enough?)

Man/Woman: This is the one 100% legitimate (now)-masculine-form-derived word: “man” was an original common-gender Mensch; the gender-specific added the prefixes “wer” and “wif”, the “wer” being cognate with the Latin “vir” (hence virile, virtue) as well as the element in “werewolf” and the like. For reasons far more likely than their formation the result of gender bias, “wermann” lost its prefix and “wifmann” did not.

(eta: “wifmann” had become “wiman” by the time of Middle English. Now Anglo-Norman scribes had the odd habit of writing a lowercase n, u, and v written as two downstrokes, m and w were written as three downstrokes, and I a single downstroke, capitalized partly to make it stand out among so many plain downstrokes. Sequences like “sun” became “SIIII” and “wiman”, “IIIIIIIAN”. The scribes came to write the vowel by convention as an o even when it was never pronounced that way. “Love”, “son”, and “woman” have never been pronounced with an O and there is no link to “womb” – “wiman” just happened to be graphically inconvenient.)

Male/Female: This seems to be a case of the two words mutually influencing each other (to be redundant). They’re derived from the Latin “masculus” and “femella”, diminutive of “femina”. So the M and the L have completely different derivations, although curiously, the feminine form seems to have influenced the masculine more than the other way around, making it a veritable feminist among gendered words.

…

Human/Man: As noted above, “man” is a Germanic element meaning the first-person guy for thousands of years. “Human” is probably a Renaissance coinage from the Latin “humanus”. This comes from a root meaning “earth, earthen” (life breathed into clay, or earthen rather than the celestial gods) shown also in “exhume” (to dig up [a body]) and “humble”/”humility” (literally down to earth).

Person/Son: “Son”, similarly, is from an ancient Germanic element. As recently as my great-great-grandfather’s time rustic Swedes used to still use patronymics, like Russian, only in Sweden it was your only last name (Lars Persson begat Anders Larson begat Maria Andersdotter). When a Carl Andersson came to America in the 1870s, he changed his name to Charles Anderson and somehow ended up in the Northern Neck, of all places, where he had my great-grandmother.

“Person” has an interesting history. To begin with, I’ve seen two etymologies, one more fanciful and perhaps older and more speculative than the other. The sources are in agreement that the word comes from the Latin “persona”, meaning “mask” (as in an ancient play denoting a character). From here the sources diverge; all but one derive it from an Etruscan word, while that dissenting opinion said that it’s from per (through) + sonare (to sound), the mask being physically the thing you deliver your lines through. I’m inclined to think that was the standard 19th-century interpretation before the Etruscan corpus had been seriously studied, and that I had found an old etymology. Nineteenth-century books are not uncommon in classical philology (thank you, Abebooks.)