Is it inhumane to call aliens men?

A fairly common source of lexical awkwardness in scifi and fantasy is the inhumane disregard of the fact that appealing to the humanity of a non-human or simply referring to them as man is probably rather offensive.
The worst offender is probably Star Trek: Cpt Picard loved appealing to someone's humanity. The show may have produced the quote that "the federation is no more than a Homo sapiens only club", but that is no justification for sloppy language.

Firstly, what is a better word for humanity?
Humanity has four meanings:

• the collective term for humans. Synonym: mankind.
• the quality of being human. No synonym as manly means masculine.
• the abstract noun of humane (not human). Synonyms: compassion, benevolence, kindness, magnanimity.
• the arts. Also from humane.

So basically the use of the words humane, inhumane and humanity are signs of sloppy writing as compassionate, cruel and compassion would do nicely.

Secondly, what is the collective term for certain races?

There are very few examples to work off and they are not consistent.
The suffix -kind is an Old English suffix present in mankind, it is better than the Latin suffix -ity as the latter is added to adjectives to also make abstract nouns (mens, mentis (mind) noun > mental adj. > mentality abs. noun). Hence the fact why humanity means both mankind and mannishness.

Technically, mankind is a one off combination in the dictionary. Another one that was lost is Angelcynn (Anglekin). Note that it is from the noun angel (Angle), not the adjective ænglisc (English, pertaining to the Angles) similarly to mankind and not mannishkind. Somewhere along the way the words elvenkind and dwarvenkind appeared, which are both of which are from the adjective.

Parenthetically, the adjectives of non-human races are absent in many cases, so adding -ish or -ic makes the word sound unusual in the first place —as -ish isn't constructive, while -ic sounds odd on words that don't stem from Latin/Greek.
Tolkien made a curious distinction between elven/dwarven and elvish/dwarvish in that the former adjectives mean "pertaining to x", while the latter mean "made by x". Orcish doesn't have a similar division (Orcadian is someone from Orkney). Orckind has more google hits than orcishkind and follows the pattern of mankind. Similarly, goblinkind and trollkind are less convoluted than having to make up an adjective: goblin is from Old French (gobelinic?), while troll is a Swedish recent loanword (trollisk?).
What about Latinate words? Gnomes > gnomic and dragons > draconic. Gnomekind vs. gnomickind?
The former sounds better again due to the lack of the c'k cluster. The alternative, following humanity is gnomicity and draconity, but they do sound like the quality of being a gnome/dragon.
On the flipside, when there is a consonant clash like elfkind or dwarfkind the adjective sounds better Similarly Scottishkind sounds better than Scottkind and felinekind sounds better than catkind —although felinekind and felininty might have some ablaut change kicking in (/fi:lɑjn/ > /fəlɪnəti:/).
So in conclusion, there does not seem to be a strict rule to adding -kind.

Secondly, is a man human only? And what about the suffix -man?
Well, yes and no. The word man generally refers to male humans only, but derived terms generally don't.
The word man itself is weird in that it used to mean both genders, with woman and hipman as the gender specific ones. That is why the word mankind is the collective noun for all humans.
Irrespective of etymology, nowadays there are many case where the -man suffix is replaced with person, when a woman has that task, e.g. chairperson. However it sounds so weird that probably taking the etymological standpoint for the suffix -man is the best bet. Vulcan crewperson sounds like one is trying hard to be polically correct, while Vulcan crewman sounds fine.
In Star Trek The Original Series Spock calls himself, and is called, a man on many occasions… but then again he is a Vulcan who speaks Vulcan and is from Vulcan, a planet orbiting the star Vulcan (40 Eridani).
In Star wars Legacy John Ostrander adds colour to the dialogue by adding Huttese or Mandalorian swearwords or terms of endearment. One cool thing is the use of the word sentient instead of man or person and it works really well. By extension, sentiency would be the collective term for all sentients.

In conclusion, sentient and compassion work really well to replace the words man and humanity, while the suffix kind does not have any clear rules.

millionennium and the ennium suffix

Yahoo Answers is probably the only think Yahoo! has going for itself, yet the system is far from perfect. Many answers are wrong or retarded, but once the time has finished the Q/A are fixed and no new answers can be added. I stumbled across one that was wrong and here is the correct answer.

I was curious to see if a word for a set number of years beyond millennium existed, but it doesn't.
However, it does not mean new words cannot be made: the Latin word for year, annus, possess a suffix form -ennium for exactly this purpose. Actually, in Italian -enne is a commonly used as a suffix (on Italian numbers) to say "years old", eg. an undicenne is a 11-yo.

• Year
• biennium
• triennium
• quadriennium
• lustrum
• decade
• century
• millenium
• "decamillennium"
• "centimillennium"
• "millionennium"
• "billionennium"
• etc.

The catch is that all the -illion numbers do not exist in Latin and that their usage only was standardised recently whereas before there were two conflicting systems, called the long and short scale. We now solely use the latter, whereas remnants of the former are still present in some languages, in Italian, for example, billion is called miliardo (trillion is trilione). The word million is actually of Late Latin/early Italian origin and is the word thousand (mille) with the augmentative suffix -one (in Anglish they came up with the cool sounding "micklered", instead of calquing and getting "overthousand"), whereas the Romans and other folk simply would say a thousand thousand. It is rather weird to think that people used get along just fine without having the need to deal with large numbers... or possibly their denial of such need is the reason why the Roman empire's economy was a disaster.

Fossilised participles

What do nature and furniture have to do with the future?

Participles are adjectives formed from a verb, in English there are two flavours, the active present participle (in -ing) and the passive past participle (in -ed).

In English, there are a great deal of fossilised Latin participles, which are hiding…

In Latin there were four, the active present participle in -ans or -ens (-ant or -ent in English), the passive participle in -atus or -itus (-ate or -ite in English), the active future participle in -aturus or -iturus (-ature or -iture in English) and the passive future participle (actually called a gerundive) -andus or -endus.

It is rather cool thing to know as they are easy to spot.

For example,

Expectant means expecting, dependant means depending on, constant means standing with.

Separate means sperated, ingrate means that has not been graced, passionate means that has been given passion.

Agenda means that will be done, graduand means that will be graduated, memorandum means that will be remembered.

And finally, nature means that will beget (nascent is the present participle equivalent), furniture means that will furnish and future means that will be.

What the logic was for nature and furniture to be future participles is a different matter entirely…

The -meal suffix

An Old English suffix that has been unjustly forgotten is the -meal suffix.
If something is done gradually the phrase that is normally used is x by x, in archaic English -meal suffix can do the same thing, similarly to the Latin -atim. It is not constructive anymore, but several examples are present in the OED:

• piecemeal: piece by piece —only one not obsolete
• stickmeal (styccemǣlum): bit by bit
• yearmeal (gēarmǣlum): year after year
• sheafmeal (scēafmǣlum): sheaf by sheaf, although the later pagemeal works better
• stemmeal (stemmǣlum): turn by turn, alternately
• stepmeal (stæpmǣlum): step by step, gradually
• namemeal (nammǣlum): name by name
• dropmeal: drop by drop
• flockmeal: group by group
• footmeal: foot by foot
• heapmeal: heap by heap
• limbmeal: limb by limb
• stoundmeal: hour by hour
• cupmeal: cup by cup
• gobbetmeal: fragment by fragment
• littlemeal: little by little
• parcelmeal: parcel by parcel
• pennymeal: penny by penny
• piecemeal: piece by piece
• poundmeal: pound by pound
• ravishmeal: rapidly (a Latinisms  by Wyclif from raptim)
• tablemeal: iPad tablet by iPad tablet (from tabulatim)
• fitmeal: jitter by jitter
• inchmeal: inch by inch
• jointmeal: joint by joint
• lumpmeal: lump by lumb
• pagemeal: page by page

Unfortunately, converting the imperial units to metric, sounds terrible, eg. millimetremeal, so they'll have to stay imperial.

Verbatim et letteratim is an expression that means word by word and letter by letter, in other words, with insane thoroughness. It is a rather cool, so with the above it would be wordmeal and lettermeal.

The only problem is that, even knowing the meaning, the words wholemeal, wheatmeal and oatmeal spring to mind…