There are many unhandled plurals which end with known exceptions #4
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This is a tricky problem for some cases, for example "stamen" shouldn't become "staman" (I don't think so anyway), so the only way I can think of to procede is to just add each example to the list. |
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My impression (I haven't done any research, though) is that words like "stamen" are the exception. I only included a few examples like "airmen", but there are a LOT of those. Just about anything can have "men" or "women" tacked onto it, and it should singularize to "man" or "woman". There are a lot fewer that end in "wolves", probably, but I would think virtually all of them would singularize to "wolf". Ah, here's a way to look at it... According to scrabblefinder.com, there are 3 words (besides "wolf" itself) which end in "wolf": werwolf, werewolf, and aardwolf. There are 10 that end in "wife" (besides wife): alewife, huswife, midwife, oldwife, housewife, superwife, farmwife, fishwife, goodwife, kalewife. There are over 400 that end in "man" (including those that end in "woman"). Here's where I would argue the default should be to singularize any word ending in "men" to "man". That's a long list, and there are probably any number of other words which logically could have "men" tacked on the end and make sense, and be expected to singularize to "man". There will be exceptions like "stamen", but I think that'll be a much shorter list. |
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My list of words ending in "men" looks like this: abdomen Either way, there seem to be quite a few exceptions in the list, so we need to make either an exception list or a list of -men words. |
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Probably the best thing to do is to make a list of both -men/-wives/ etc. which are and are not plurals. This ensures room to manoeuvre in the future. I don't have time to do this right now so I will leave this issue open. If you want to do the work then please do it. Thanks. |
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One of your references (http://www.macmillandictionary.com/thesaurus-category/british/Irregular-plurals) lists people => person. I'd like to see that included, since I need it. |
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It should be in there now (version 0.14). I didn't write a test for it so On 5 August 2014 15:58, Ron Savage [email protected] wrote:
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Hi Ben Beautiful. Thanx. On 05/08/14 19:12, Ben Bullock wrote:
Ron Savage |
airmen, businesswomen, townsmen, housewives, werewolves.
There are already exceptions for "men", "women", "wives", and "wolves", but somehow those should also apply to words ending with "men" etc, rather than just those strings.
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