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

Nik:
> And Rosta wrote:
> > "man" and "woman" are unique in pluralizing "men", "women", so the
> > resemblance is morphological as well as phonological. Indeed, for
> > this reason it is tempting to analyse "woman" as cranberry morph
> > "wo-" + morpheme "man".
>
> Except "woman" does *not* include the word "man" in it, at least in my
> dialect.
I don't see your grounds for saying this.

> Maybe in others, I don't know.  At most, you could analyze
> "woman" as consisting of *"wo" plus "-man" (/m@n/), which has only an
> orthographic resemblance to "man" (/m&n/), altho both share the same
> plural /mIn/ (or /mEn/ in dialects that don't collapse /I/ and /E/
> before nasals)
Okay, yes, the A>E plural is purely orthographic, as it is when
{man} is compounded, e.g. _dustman/dustmen_ are both /'dVsm@n/
(in my accent that lacks a contrast between /@/ and unstressed /I/).

But I see no phonological or morphological reasons for not
analysing 'woman' as 'wo+man', and that analysis has the advantage
of accounting for the lack of -s plural, *womans.

Tom:
> > "man" and "woman" are unique in pluralizing "men", "women", so the
> > resemblance is morphological as well as phonological.
>
> I'm not entirely convinced by that.  For me, the apophony in
> the first syllable is the salient pluralizer, since the second
> syllable's vowel would reduce to schwa whether it was an
> underlying /&/ or underlying /E/.
This is true, but it is consistent with 'woman' being 'wo+man'.
If it is not wo+man, then you leave yourself having to say it
is pure coincidence that wo+man is semantically and morphologically
a viable analysis, and that the plural is not *womans.

--And.

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