That is sort of what prompted this poll. doteatop made a similar comment.
I think that /-s/ is a neutral affix that doesn't change word stress. Which means that you're unlikely to get a change in vowel quality.
Making words like "busses" into a special would come at the cost of making them harder to spell. I guess that might be a reasonable trade off, given that we tend to read a lot more than we write.
Right. I understood what you meant. I'm just saying that students could be given a specific regular rule for the plural /-s/ affix.
The phonics books that I've used for adult literacy tutoring introduce word stress and looking for morphemes. I remember there being a lot of work on suffixes, but I don't remember exactly how /-s/ plurals are treated.
Wikipedia tells me that this is just one of a couple of different schools of thought on phonics, though, and that others don't do much with morpheme level analysis of words.
Looked it up, I didaplomadaJune 4 2008, 20:01:55 UTC
Yup, OED says omnibus is the date plural of omni, and in that declension (?) means "for all." Curiously enough, bus-persons were apparently also originally called omnibusses. Presumably because they worked for all? The OED, always diplomatic, also acknowledges both of the plural forms in question.
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I think that /-s/ is a neutral affix that doesn't change word stress. Which means that you're unlikely to get a change in vowel quality.
Making words like "busses" into a special would come at the cost of making them harder to spell. I guess that might be a reasonable trade off, given that we tend to read a lot more than we write.
Reply
(The comment has been removed)
The phonics books that I've used for adult literacy tutoring introduce word stress and looking for morphemes. I remember there being a lot of work on suffixes, but I don't remember exactly how /-s/ plurals are treated.
Wikipedia tells me that this is just one of a couple of different schools of thought on phonics, though, and that others don't do much with morpheme level analysis of words.
Reply
"Busses" as a plural has always looked weird to me, but it looks right as a verb ("busses tables").
BTW -- if you don't know who I am -- we went to college together. We were both in Honors House as freshmen.
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The only one I remember off the top of my head is "comics" which is borrowed in to Russian as a singular word for comic book.
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