Varför smörgåsar och inte smörgäss? Om problemet med oregelbunden plural i sammansättningar
The plural -ar in smörgåsar for smörgås ‘sandwich’ is regular – even though gås ‘goose’, here used as a simplex, takes an irregular plural, gäss ‘geese’. Why is the form smörgäss not used? Similarly, for trefot, lit. three foot, ‘tripod’, neither trefotar nor the irregular trefötter seems right. To use an irregular plural in such compounds tends to evoke a core reading (“kärnbetydelse”) of the rig