Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/mann-

Etymology
From or. Alternatively, Kroonen favors the word splitting off from in the cases where the -m- wasn't syllabic (which otherwise gave, see ), the initial cluster would have been unpronounceable in Germanic, giving a reduced.

Noun

 * 1) human, human being, person, individual
 * 2) man

Inflection
This noun was inflected as a consonant stem, but the daughter languages disagree on the form of the nominative singular. The Gothic form points to a nominative *man(n)ô, as does the rare 🇨🇬 nominative. The north and west Germanic forms, on the other hand, indicate *mannz. Judging from Gothic evidence, the original compounding form was *mana(n)- with only a single -n-, as in ; however, note also.

Several ideas have been proposed to explain the unusual morphology of this word, particularly the geminate -nn-. One proposal is that its stem was manwa- (wa-stem) or manu- (u-stem), where -nw- would have become -nn- through regular sound change in Germanic. This explains the relationship of the noun to cognates elsewhere in Indo-European, but crucially it does not explain the consonant stem inflection.

A more recent proposal is that the noun reflects a root man- to which n-stem endings have been added. These n-stem endings were not the usual type found in Germanic, but a rarer type that lacked a vowel between the root and the stem suffix in some of the forms. This is also seen in (which has the stem *uhsn- in the plural),  (with *arn-),  (with *bern-) and 🇨🇬 (with carn-). The stem without a vowel would have then been *man-n-, to which consonant stem endings would have been added, as n-stems were consonant stems in origin. If this is the case, it would explain the geminate -nn-, the consonant stem endings, and would also account for the n-stem nominative singular found in Gothic and Old English.