Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

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

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Sunday, May 26, 2002, 23:05
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. -- "There's no such thing as 'cool'. Everyone's just a big dork or nerd, you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." - overheard ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42

Replies

Kendra <kendra@...>
Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
And Rosta <a-rosta@...>