[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Sun Nov 28 14:19:30 UTC 2021

Thanks very much, Alex! That’s very interesting! Nice evidence of the practice. Hope it went to the list. 

All the best,
Randy

Sent from my phone

> On 28 Nov 2021, at 8:09 PM, Alex Francois <alex.francois.cnrs at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> dear Randy,
> 
> Interesting. Likewise, reading aloud was the norm in the West during Antiquity, and through most of the Medieval period.
> The first mention of silent reading in the West dates to late Antiquity.  
> Around 384 AD, Augustine of Hippo [St. Augustine] travelled to Milan, where he met with Ambrose.  In his Confessions, he would later recall how surprised he was to see Ambrose reading not aloud, but silently to himself:
> 
>> “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.”
> 
>> [original text, §6.3: Sed cum legebat, oculi ducebantur per paginas et cor intellectum rimabatur, vox autem et lingua quiescebant. Saepe cum adessemus (non enim vetabatur quisquam ingredi aut ei venientem nuntiari mos erat), sic eum legentem vidimus tacite.]
> 
> The most instructive aspect of this passage is probably Augustine's surprise at a practice he had never witnessed before.
> Alex
> Alex François
> 
> LaTTiCe — CNRS–ENS–Sorbonne nouvelle
> Australian National University
> Academia.edu
> Personal homepage
> _________________________________________
> 
> 
>> On Sun, 28 Nov 2021 at 12:30, Randy J. LaPolla <randy.lapolla at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear Jocelyn,
>>>  I guess it's an hint
>>> indicating that the practice of silent reading in Chinese could be much
>>> older than the European practice.
>> 
>> In China up to the 20th century, writing was read aloud (讀、念、誦、籀), and texts were memorized by reading aloud, so writing was to a large extent just a memory aid. (Cf. Goody & Watt, p. 316-17, 319). Even as late as the 1980’s, it was common in Chinese university campuses to hear a large number of students reading aloud early in morning. Y. R. Chao, the most famous Chinese linguist, was trained that way, and mentioned in his works that he felt it was a much better way to read and learn.
>> In teaching texts were often not even explained, just memorized by reciting aloud, and a student didn't start writing (開筆) until after many years of memorizing texts in this way.
>> 
>> By the way, I highly recommend Jack Goody & Ian Watt 1963, "The Consequences of Literacy" (Comparative Studies in Society and History 5.3: 304-345), on the differences between a literate and non-literate society and the different ways writing/reading can be understood.
>> 
>> Randy
>> ——
>> Professor Randy J. LaPolla（罗仁地), PhD FAHA 
>> Center for Language Sciences
>> Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences
>> Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai Campus
>> A302, Muduo Building, #18 Jinfeng Road, Zhuhai City, Guangdong, China
>> 
>> 邮编：519000
>> 广东省珠海市唐家湾镇金凤路18号木铎楼A302
>> 北京师范大学珠海校区
>> 人文和社会科学高等研究院
>> 语言科学研究中心 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 26 Nov 2021, at 7:25 PM, Jocelyn Aznar <contact at jocelynaznar.eu> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Dear Ian,
>>> 
>>> I'm not sure what you mean by Thai, Tibetan, Khmer, Japanese, pre-modern
>>> Korean not having spaces. I mean, ok you don't have to type them as
>>> such, but there are white spaces between the characters, they are just
>>> not systematically indicating the word boundaries but can also other
>>> make obvious other linguistic phenomena/cues, like syllables, sounds,
>>> semantic traits, etc.
>>> 
>>> People looking at the history of writing (like Paul Saenger's Space
>>> Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading [the text was criticized on
>>> the accuracy of historical account but, not on the general thesis as far
>>> as I'm aware]) showed the relationship between typography and the
>>> practice of reading, like for instance being able to read silently, a
>>> practice that was very restricted first and got more common in Europe
>>> during the XVIIe century (if I remember well). Some historians also
>>> report on how reading aloud or silently affect how people interpreting
>>> differently the relationship between the texts and its narrator (here to
>>> be understood from Gérard Genette's narratologic conception, that is the
>>> narrator as the character telling a story, not the actual person
>>> writing/telling it).
>>> 
>>> I guess for SMS messages in Riau Indonesian, people were first to read
>>> them aloud while writing. And now that they integrated spaces as a
>>> character, they should write them without reading them aloud.
>>> 
>>> This topic about white spaces also reminds me how some French colleagues
>>> who were quite fluent in Mandarin Chinese reported that it was faster
>>> for them to read a text in Chinese than in French, as you mostly didn't
>>> speak (in your head) the text while reading it. I guess it's an hint
>>> indicating that the practice of silent reading in Chinese could be much
>>> older than the European practice.
>>> 
>>> Best,
>>> Jocelyn
>>> 
>>>> Le 26/11/2021 à 11:54, JOO, Ian [Student] a écrit :
>>>> Dear David,
>>>> 
>>>> thank you for introducing your interesting paper which I’ll have a look
>>>> into soon.
>>>> But, I don’t think speakers not employing spaces necessarily indicates
>>>> the absence of wordhood.
>>>> In many traditional orthographies, there are no spaces at all: Thai,
>>>> Tibetan, Khmer, Japanese, pre-modern Korean, etc.
>>>> But that wouldn’t necessarily mean that Thai speakers don’t perceive words.
>>>> Many orthographies only transcribe consonants - but that wouldn’t mean
>>>> that the speakers don’t perceive vowels as phonological units.
>>>> So I think the emergence of spaces is sufficient, but not necessary,
>>>> evidence of wordhood.
>>>> 
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Ian
>>>>> On 26 Nov 2021, 6:45 PM +0800, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de>, wrote:
>>>>> Following on Nikolaus' comment, it is also an experiment that is
>>>>> performed whenever speakers of an unwritten language decide to
>>>>> introduce an orthography for the first time:  Do they insert spaces,
>>>>> and if so where?
>>>>> 
>>>>> I wrote about about this in Gil (2020), with reference to a
>>>>> naturalistic corpus of SMS messages in Riau Indonesian, produced in
>>>>> 2003, which was the year everybody in the village I was staying in got
>>>>> their first mobile phones and suddenly had to figure out how to write
>>>>> their language.  In the 2020 article, my focus was more on the
>>>>> presence or absence of evidence for bound morphology, and less on
>>>>> whether they introduce spaces in the first case. What I did not
>>>>> mention there, but which is most germane to Ian's query, is the latter
>>>>> question, whether they use spaces at all.  In fact, my corpus contains
>>>>> lots of messages that were written without spaces at all.  Within a
>>>>> couple of years the orthography became more conventionalized, and
>>>>> everybody started using spaces, but to begin with, at least, it seemed
>>>>> like many speakers were not entertaining any (meta-)linguistic notion
>>>>> of 'word' whatsoever.
>>>>> 
>>>>> (BTW, in Riau and many other dialects of Indonesian, the word for
>>>>> 'word', /kata/, also means 'say'.)
>>>>> 
>>>>> David
>>>>> 
>>>>> Gil, David (2020) "What Does It Mean to Be an Isolating Language? The
>>>>> Case of Riau Indonesian", in D. Gil and A. Schapper eds.,
>>>>> /Austronesian Undressed: How and Why Languages Become Isolating/, John
>>>>> Benjamins, Amsterdam, 9-96.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On 26/11/2021 12:11, Nikolaus P Himmelmann wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Hi
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> On 26/11/2021 10:17, JOO, Ian [Student] wrote:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> The question would be, when one asks a speaker of a given language
>>>>>>> to divide a sentence into words, would the number of words be
>>>>>>> consistent throughout different speakers?
>>>>>>> It would be an interesting experiment. I’d be happy to be informed
>>>>>>> of any previous study who conducted such an experiment.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Yes, indeed. And it is an experiment, though largely uncontrolled,
>>>>>> that is carried out whenever someone carries out fieldwork on an
>>>>>> undocumented lect. In this context, speakers provide evidence for
>>>>>> word units in two ways: a) in elicitation when prompted by pointing
>>>>>> or with a word from a contact language; b) when chunking a recording
>>>>>> into chunks that can be written down by the researcher.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> In my experience, speakers across a given community are pretty
>>>>>> consistent in both activities though one may distinguish two basic
>>>>>> types speakers. One group provides word-like units, so when you ask
>>>>>> for "stone" you get a minimal form for stone. The other primarily
>>>>>> provides utterance-like units. So you do not get "stone" but rather
>>>>>> "look at this stone", "how big the stone is", "stones for building
>>>>>> ovens" or the like.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Depending on the language, there is some variation in the units
>>>>>> provided in both activities but this is typically restricted to the
>>>>>> kind of phenomena that later on cause the main problems in the
>>>>>> analytical reconstruction of a word unit, i.e. mostly phenomena that
>>>>>> come under the broad term of "clitics". In my view, one should
>>>>>> clearly distinguish between these analytical reconstructions, which
>>>>>> are basic building blocks of grammatial descriptions, and the
>>>>>> "natural" units provided by speakers, which are primary data
>>>>>> providing the basis for the description.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Best
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Nikolaus
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> --  
>>>>> David Gil
>>>>> 
>>>>> Senior Scientist (Associate)
>>>>> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
>>>>> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
>>>>> Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany
>>>>> 
>>>>> Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
>>>>> Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
>>>>> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> /Disclaimer:/
>>>> 
>>>> /This message (including any attachments) contains confidential
>>>> information intended for a specific individual and purpose. If you are
>>>> not the intended recipient, you should delete this message and notify
>>>> the sender and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (the University)
>>>> immediately. Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message,
>>>> or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited and may
>>>> be unlawful./
>>>> 
>>>> /The University specifically denies any responsibility for the accuracy
>>>> or quality of information obtained through University E-mail Facilities.
>>>> Any views and opinions expressed are only those of the author(s) and do
>>>> not necessarily represent those of the University and the University
>>>> accepts no liability whatsoever for any losses or damages incurred or
>>>> caused to any party as a result of the use of such information./
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Lingtyp mailing list
>>>> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>>> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Lingtyp mailing list
>>> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Lingtyp mailing list
>> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20211128/6ea7e6c3/attachment.htm>