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

Quoting And Rosta <a-rosta@...>:

> Tom:
> > Quoting And Rosta <a-rosta@...>:
> > > 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.
> >
> > We're getting down to one of those infamously thorny problems in
> > linguistics:  where to put the divide between phonology and
> > morphology.  I don't think anyone has ever come up with a consistent
> > methodology to decide what belongs in what field.  (It works the
> > other way too: when something is difficult for your field, you
> > do the "Linguist's punt" and put it elsewhere.)
>
> I don't rightly see how you would tell a purely phonological story
> about this, but I take your general point about boundary drawing
> and buck passing.
Well, the point is:  underlying representations are mental constructs
that *learners* have posited as a base from which to apply all sorts
of linguistic rules.  When, as I stated is the case for me with
"woman", there is no evidence from phonological alternations like
the German examples we discussed earlier, there can be no basis
for a morphological analysis either. This is because morphemic
theory, at least in its classical form, says that changes of meaning
must be associated with changes of phonological form.

> I also don't think that the 'correct' analysis
> of morphological irregulars is really a settlable question, though
> I think that we can legitimately ask, as Ray said, how the
> person in the street perceives things.
I entirely agree. I just think that in this case, there is no reason
to posit distinctive URs.

-- writes Tom, listening to a sublime recording of Händel's
_Julius Cäsar_.

=====================================================================
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