German has two words, Mensch is the usual word for human, but Mann ist "man, male" only. Also, the usual classical Latin word for "man, male" was vir, not homo.

You say, “in almost all languages”, but you only really give two examples: Latin (and its descendants) and Common Germanic (and its descendants), which are close to each other geographically and were in each other’s sphere of influence. There are tons of languages where this didn’t happen, even in the same region: Celtic languages have reflexes of *gdoni̯os ‘human’ (cognate with Latin homō) vs u̯iros ‘man’; Greek has ἄνθρωπος ‘human’ vs ἀνήρ ‘man’. Further afield, Chinese and Japanese 人 rén / hito, -jin is exclusively ‘human’ (男 nán / otoko, dan- is ‘male’), etc.

@SirCornflakes The point is that Mann, which now refers only to males, historically meant ‘human being’; the narrowing down to exclude females happened within Germanic. Similarly, homō primarily meant ‘human being’, but most of its descendants (French homme, Spanish hombre, Portuguese homem, Italian uomo, etc.) now generally refer to males only.

@JanusBahsJacquet Thank you. I'm wondering why this happened? Because this is found mostly in those languages ​​(namely European) in whose territory Christianity spread. Could it have had such a strong influence on narrowing the meaning of the words “man”, “homo”, etc. After all, this is not in Asian languages ​​and there was no Christianity there. Coincidence?

@JanusBahsJacquet I'm interested in why this narrowing and exclusion of women happened?

In Russian human is человек (chelovek) and male person is мужчина (muzhchina).

@Anixx in Russian the Bible says "a human and his wife" not "muzhchina his wife "

@Orii maybe a translation issue, in modern Russian the word человек solidly means a person of any gender.

@Anixx Maybe because of this error in the translation of the Bible, the concept of human (chelovek) as primarily a man arose in Russian? (Molodoi chelovek as male). A group of people is called by its masculine gender. The word man is masculine.

quickanddirtytips.com/articles/the-history-of-the-word-woman

@Orii chelovek is a noun of masculine grammatical gender. Molodaya chelovek is simply impossible. Human can be denoted by nouns of different gender: лицо (neuter), персона (feminine), душа (feminine), индивид (masculine), etc.

@Orii the text of Bible had no effect on language,no-one reads it. In the same sentence it uses the verb "прилепится" in an awkward meaning, «Посему оставит человек отца своего и мать и прилепится к жене своей, и будут двое одна плоть». This usage confuses people, but did not affect the language any bit. It is not standard language.

At least in Ukrainian “human being, person, man in general” is feminine, людина, plural is люди.

persona is feminine.

“patriarchy”? Do you seriously imagine that pre-Christian pagan, animist, Islamic or even Hindu society features significantly more gender equality than Christian society?

@AdamBittlingmayer Pre-Christian paganism Slavic (Russian) society was less patriarchal. It became very patriarchal when Christianity came. And the Russian language most likely in those pagan times could have been less masculine?

@Orii - But how can you explain the fact that no matriarchate society has ever been registered? Or is is it not so and there really were some of those?

@Orii Your belief in these myths is ironically religious. Pagans practised polygyny and human sacrifice. Anyway, no need to time travel, if you think Christianity is too patriarchal, you can visit modern Afghanistan, most languages there have no grammatical gender.

@AdamBittlingmayer this is true. Do you think that the Bible reflects language and not language is a reflection of the Bible?

@JanusBahsJacquet I don't think Japanese is a good counterexample. For a lot of related native words, the kanji they're written with don't reflect their etymology. For example, 男 otoko splits up into oto + ko (子). The same oto is found in 乙女 otome and possibly 大人 otona, originally meaning “young”. As for the distinguishing part, me consistently means “female”, but ko doesn't really mean “male” on its own; it just means “little” or “child”. Similar female-marking happens in several Sinitic words, such as 少年 “boy” (literally small years) vs 少女 “girl” (literally small female).

@mudri True, otoko may in fact be an example of a gender-wise narrowing down (plus an age-wise broadening out that is mirrored in onna ← wo-mi-na, where wo is another word for ‘small/young’). Would perhaps have been better to use 男 o ‘man’ as an example instead, even though that’s much more restricted in usage than otoko. (In Chinese, 少年 can generally refer to both boys and girls, though more often boys; compare 少儿 [少兒] ‘child’, whose second part can mean ‘child’, but primarily means ‘son/boy’…)