Re: USAGE: WOMYN (was: RE: [CONLANG] Optimum number of symbols,though mostly talking about french now

Quoting Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...>:

> The etymology and history of 'woman' may indeed be a compound word wi:f +
> man, but for hundreds of years, and certainly in modern English, it is
> surely a single morpheme. Otherwise we're all over the place! After all,
> the still recognisably compound word 'cowboy' behaves as a single morpheme
> barely 150 years after it must originally have been coined, and presumably
> so into the far future, when we might have a form like 'koobie' or
> something.
Unlike <woman> [wU.m@n], whose final nuclear vowel is of indeterminate
UR, for me <cowboy> [k_haU(.boi(] is very distinctly composed of two
morphemes "cow" and "boy".  (This of course assumes such a thing as
morphemes exist.  There's a goodly number of morphologists that don't buy
this; e.g. Anderson's A-Morphous Morphology.)

(Incidentally, _Cowboy_ was not, technically, coined.  It's a calque
of Spanish _vaquero_, which itself comes from _vaca_ "cow".)

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier          "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
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