That's inexorable French logic. Porte-cigarette and
porte-cigarettes are two different things; we have
porte-cartes (both sg. and pl.) and I suppose *porte-plumes
would be a case for carrying (more than one) pens. The
normal plural is allowed when this distinction doesn't
matter, e.g. tire-bouchon, pl. tire-bouchons. Of course this
is not an iron-clad rule since there are obviously two
conflicting tendencies here and their tug-of-war produces
some messy variation. The one, older, is to treat such
combinations like frozen phrases, and the other is to treat
them as ordinary compound nouns.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
From: "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 07, 2001 10:21 PM
Subject: [tied] Hotels-dieu, chevaux-vapeur, porte-manteaux
et porte-plume
>Now maybe you have a
> point about porte-manteau come to think of it
(porte-manteaux, pl.), but
> then, the plural of porte-plume is the same as the
singular. So what is the
> difference between the compounds /porte-manteau/ and
/porte-plume/ then? ...