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

Quoting Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>:

> 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.
Well, there are *diachronic* double plurals in English -- the plural
of _child_-, for example, originally had the same plural that you see
in its German cognate _Kinder_, but later acquired the -@n ending during
the ME period, IIRC.  It's just that these are so small in number that
it makes little synchronic sense to analyze this as _child_ + -r + -en.
It takes less mental effort simply to memorize that than to parse it
into three distinct morphemes which (presumably) would interact with
the grammar on other levels, e.g., prosody.

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