Re: Etymology of "Woman" Comic

Hello!

On 6/2/05, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
>
> A comedy fantasy piece I read years ago had a "wereman" in it; a wolf that
> turned into a man at full moon. I've always wondered if the author was aware of
> the etymology.
If that's the story I'm thinking of (it was called "The Wife's Story"
or "The Wife's Tale" or something like that), then yes, the author
should have been aware of the etymology, what with her being Ursula K.
LeGuin, daughter of famous anthropologist/linguist Alfred L.
Kroeber... :-)

On the other hand, it wasn't a comedic story IIRC, so we may be
thinking of different stories after all.

Incidentally, there's a funny German poem (by Christian Morgenstern, I
think) about a werewolf who wants to find out how to inflect the word
"werewolf" correctly. Since the German word for a werewolf is
_Werwolf_ and _wer_ happens to be the interrogative pronoun "who", his
teacher starts inflecting: _der Werwolf_ ("the who-wolf"), _des
Weswolfes_ ("the whose-wolf's"), _dem Wemwolf_ ("the whom-wolf",
dative), _den Wenwolf_ ("the whom-wolf", accusative). The werewolf is
devastated when he learns that you can't form a plural this way -- how
is that possible? He has a family, after all, so how can there be no
grammatical way to *talk* about several werewolves at once if it's
totally possible to *encounter* several werewolves at once? ;-)

Regards,
Julia

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)