Nominalized inflectional morphemes

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:23 PM -0400 8/29/02, Mark A Mandel wrote:
>On Thu, 29 Aug 2002, Scott Sadowsky wrote:
>
>#The word "bus", from the Latin "omnibus", is curious in that it's a
>#nominalized inflectional morpheme -- the ablative (I believe) of "omni".
>
>We-ell... it's not an inflectional morpheme in English, and it was never
>nominalized in Latin. IMHO it's parallel to "phone" < "telephone": the
>last syllable of a word whose etym. structure is opaque to the
>abbreviators. That doesn't answer your question, of course.
>
Nor does the fact that it's more plausibly a dative plural in the
above context ('for all'), although formally the ablative is
identical.

larry