Uni The Unicorn Quotes

It wouldn't be a unicorn without a horn. That's what the word means! Uni, for one. And then corn for, you know, horn. One-horned." "Yeah, but they're supposed to be all peaceful and nice. Why would a unicorn need a horn? What's it do with it?" Mini turned red. "I dunno. For shooting off magic and stuff." "Or they use it to maul things." "Thats horrible, Aru" They're unicorns. They're perfect.

French provides a very striking case of multiple meta-analysis. Our word unicorn derives from Latin, in which it is composed of uni- ‘one’ and cornu ‘horn’. In English, nothing much has happened to this word, except that most speakers, knowing nothing of Latin, probably don’t assign any internal structure to it: they just regard it as a single morpheme, on a par with horse or giraffe. Most European languages have the identical word, but the French word is the curious licorne. Where did this come from? The original word, of course, was unicorne, a grammatically feminine noun. But the French word for ‘a’ with a feminine noun is une – and hence unicorne was misinterpreted as une icorne, and icorne therefore became the French name of the beast. But the French word for ‘the’ before a noun beginning with a vowel is l’. Hence ‘the unicorne’ was expressed as l’icorne – and this form in turn was reanalysed as a single noun licorne, producing the modern form.

Uni