Re: men, elves, wolves, and robots; was: man, etc.
| From: | Doug Dee <amateurlinguist@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, December 27, 2004, 13:50 |
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In a message dated 12/26/2004 8:56:07 PM Eastern Standard Time,
butsuri@MYREALBOX.COM writes:
>> Almost certainly the former. English words with the "gyno-" root
>> (e.g. "gynecology", as Sally mentioned) are (nearly?) univerally
>> pronounced with /gai_^n/.
>Actually, most of the examples I can think of don't - "androgyny",
>"misogyny", "polygyny".
This sort of thing has always struck me as peculiar. The "gyn" in
"gynecology" and in "androgyny" represents the same morpheme, but is pronounced entirely
differenently. If English were an unwritten language, it probably wouldn't
occur to any of the speakers that there was any connection between the /gajn/
of "gynecology" and the /dZIn/ of "androgyny"
I guess my tastes run towards more agglutinative languages.
Doug
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