but I cannot be multiplied, even though grammar says that we is the plural of I. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that I and we have different roots. Likewise they is not the plural of he, she, or it.

Uh, it is in Mandarin. I = wǒ, we = wǒmen, he/she/it (when “it” isn’t just zero) = tā, they = tāmen. The same holds for “you”, both normal and especially polite. The suffix -men is almost never applied to nouns, but it’s still obviously a suffix!

The merger of synonyms within one paradigm may not have been the only source of suppletion, but it was an important one.

That’s what happened to the Romance “go” words. Their forms are cobbled together from three Latin verbs: ambulare “go for a walk”, vadere “go away, cede, buzz off”, and ire, good old “go”. The fad for dysphemisms at the beginning of Romance must have had a lot to do with this.

Speaking of ire, I bet that’s what eode is related to. The Old English dialect of Wessex regularly has eo where the rest of the Germanic world has i (seolfor – “silver”, German Silber).

I find this interesting, because (in most dialects) modern Irish does not pronounce “f” in the middle of verbs, e.g. “caithfidh” is pronounced more or less “caihee”. Not necessarily related of course!

Separately, from one of the January collections, “niche” in Ireland rhymes with “quiche” and not much else, not with “witch”. I’d guess it’s less of a buzzword here than in the States.

I believe he was using “derived” in a narrower sense, meaning that one word is not created from the other using derivational morphology. “Woman” was created as a compound of “wife” + “man”, but it was not formed by adding a derivational suffix to “man” as “Professorin” is created by adding one to “Professor” in German.

If I’ve understood this correctly you are saying that ‘woman’ is not derived from ‘man.’ However I thought that ‘woman’ is derived from ‘man’ (linguistically only!) as ‘woman’ is the modern form of ‘wife-man’ from A.S. when ‘man’ was applied to both sexes.

It’s significant to me, and probably to many other speakers of British English. I can only use the “Did” form when the context has been established as remote from the here-and-now”.

“Did you put the butter in the refrigerator yesterday, or the day before?” is OK

“Did you put the butter in the refrigerator”, in vacuo, is nonsensical in my native dialect (although I’m used to it now from living in the US).

Apologies for a somewhat pedantic post that is tangential to the main topic of your article, but what else are comments for?

There’s something that I didn’t quite understand, though. You wrote, “But in no language are the words for ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ derived from those for ‘boy’ and ‘man’.” And then you said that language keeps those concepts apart.

Indeed, in my mother tongue, (Brazilian) Portuguese, it’s homem/mulher for man/woman, but it’s menino/menina or garoto/garota for boy/girl. Granted, that’s a case of inflection, not word formation via derivation (if I remember my uni classes correctly), but still it’s hard to see how my language keeps those words “apart” as you claimed. In fact, they’re considered two forms of the same word. And those pairs are no exception in Portuguese: our default morpheme for feminine is -a.

Also, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, woman comes from wife+man, which I assume was a compounding process. I understand that yet again we don’t have a case of derivation (plus today’s speakers may be oblivious to the morphological relationship there once was). But still I don’t see how we can say those two words are set apart… at least not in Old English.

I’d be really glad if you could clarify that for me. When you said that languages keep those forms apart, did you consider only derivation, and not inflection or compounding? Thank you in advance!