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

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Monday, May 27, 2002, 1:02
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..." University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought / 1010 E. 59th Street and not complete one road that has no turn" Chicago, IL 60637 Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers