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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:Sunday, May 26, 2002, 18:40
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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And Rosta <a-rosta@...>