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

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.)

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

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