Email vs. E-mail at Wired

[Donald M. Lance]

Yes, e-mail is a compound, but the first element is not a root consisting of only a tense
high front vowel.  The 'e' is the name of a letter, as in s-mail / ess-mail and t-shirt,
which some people insist on capitalizing, I suspect not because of the shape of T but
because the initial element is the name of a letter.  I've never seen S-mail, however --
perhaps because of the metaphoricality of the 's'.  Ah, metaphoricality -- ain't language
a wonderful tool !!
DMLance

Lynne Murphy wrote:

> >We're also left with "econ" (ugh).  There's also (OK, this is pretty
> >marginal, I admit) a poker variant called "evap" ['iy-vaep].  And,
> >less marginally, "emu" (the animal, not the electronically
> >transmitted Greek letter) and "equal".
> >
> >larry
>
> Yes, but this is really just an amusement to think of e-words,
> because e-mail is in a different category than the rest, since it's
> really a compound, and thus is subject to a different set of stress
> rules and such.  I haven't been following this thread closely, but I
> think the reason to put a hyphen in e-mail is because we're not used
> to seeing compounds with one-letter constituents, so email is likely
> to be misread.  But, of course, if enough people spell it that way
> (and they probably already do--my spell-checker likes email--but not
> spellchecker!), folks'll get used to it (and probably already have).
>
> Now that I've brought it up (if someone else already hadn't) I
> suppose we can argue about whether e-mail is a compound, or whether
> it's word with a prefix.  But I've cast my vote.
>
> Lynne
> --
> M. Lynne Murphy
> Lecturer in Linguistics
> School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
> University of Sussex
> Brighton BN1 3AN    UK
> phone:  +44(0)1273-678844
> fax:    +44(0)1273-671320