USAGE: WOMYN (was: RE: [CONLANG] Optimum number ofsymbols,though mostly talking about french now
| From: | Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, May 26, 2002, 23:05 |
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And Rosta wrote:
> 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.
Just that phonetically, the second suffix of "woman" acts just like the
suffix -man for me. I don't know about your dialect, maybe you do
pronounce the second syllable like the free noun "man", but I don't.
And the suffix -man pluralizes as -men, which explains why the plural of
"woman" is "women" and not *"womans".
On the other hand, *neither* analysis explains the phonetic change in
the first syllable of /wU/ -> /wI/, and so I don't really see any
advantage to analyzing it as a compound. You'd have to say that this
"morpheme" /wU/ has a plural /wI/, which would make _women_ some kind of
double plural, unprecedented in English.
--
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