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

Michael 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.
In earlier messages in the thread I've given various arguments in
favour of _woman_ not being a single morpheme. I find them pretty
compelling, but even if you don't, I think your 'surely' is
unwarranted.

> 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.
I can't think of any morphological arguments tellingly pro or con
_cowboy_ being a single morpheme.

In terms of what one needs to know in order to know a language,
knowledge of derivational morphology is largely unnecessary.
Also, if you ask a group of people to analyse a set of words into
their component morphemes, their answers -- and more generally
their perceptions -- differ. My hunch is that as we go through
life we keep on noticing morphological structure that we hadn't
noticed before. It's not part of the language that we acquire
as competent native speakers from infancy through to puberty.

--And.