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

Tom:
> 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.)
I don't rightly see how you would tell a purely phonological story
about this, but I take your general point about boundary drawing
and buck passing. I also don't think that the 'correct' analysis
of morphological irregulars is really a settlable question, though
I think that we can legitimately ask, as Ray said, how the
person in the street perceives things.

--And.

Replies