<div dir="ltr">Regarding etymologies, ya- prefix is more specifically the lips rather than the entire oral cavity. Then gu:ta (as defined in my first reply) may be etymologically related to hu:ta, the generic term for 'neck, throat (the front part)' Lvn 'tongue' (but also part of words referring to oral parts between the lips and the throat/neck) doesn't seem to be much involved in words for word or speech, except in terms dealing with difficulties of speech (for example lvndvpi 'dumb, unable to speak, slow or stammering in speech' (dvpi means 'weak'), or lvntauwa 'tongue-tied, slow of speech' (tauwa means 'tight', or 'tied up'). I would even go so far as to hypothesize that the three zones of the oral cavity (lips, tongue, throat) differentiate different aspects of speech- the lips for more careful, controlled speech (though not always), and the throat more general, forceful speech. In many organisms there is a differentiation of effector organs such that the basal part gives the power stroke (like your upper arm near the shoulder girdle, or your thigh near the hip joint), while the distal part controls course corrections so that the effector ends up exactly where you want it. From this perspective the throat, being in the neck, constitutes the basal part, and the lips the distal.<div><br></div><div>Jess Tauber</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 9:05 AM Jess Tauber <<a href="mailto:tetrahedralpt@gmail.com">tetrahedralpt@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Yahgan (genetic isolate from Tierra del Fuego, currently critically endangered) had several terms for 'word'. ku:ta:na (colon marks tenseness of vowel preceding it) meant 'Language, speech, saying, word, a discourse', but as a verb also meant 'to speak, to say, utter, pronounce, to talk, preach, harangue'. Then the related simplex, listed as gu:ta, means 'language, speech, word, pronounceable word'. Ha:sha (sh voiceless hushing fricative) 'voice, language, uttered words, speech. Breath(ing). Cry, utterance'. bvma;na (v schwa) 'to mention, speak of, to speak of one's intentions, wishes'. and 'to say, speak, detail, give an account of any plan. To bray, as penguins'. As noun- 'language, conversation, talk, gossip'. Wa:pa(n) 'a name, a word'. Note also ya:pi:mata 'to talk, chat, speak, converse, to talk with or to', and ya:pis/ya:pvs 'talkative, noisy, given to gossip, forward with talk'. Yau(i)s (probably etymologically related to ya:pis) 'false, deceitful, a lie, (given to) lying'. Ya:si:ta 'noisy, talkative, forward of speech, given to gossip, false tongued' (-ta is an adjective suffix referring to some proclivity). Also likely related etymologically to ya:pis, yauis. Note that the language exhibits a strong tendency towards 'bipartite constructions' (though here it's more 'tripartite', with some instrumental/manner-of-action/body part prefix on the verb, followed by the main verb (which can be serialized), and finally position/pathway suffixes. ya- refers to the mouth or leading edge of something, and is found in a good number of complexes referring to talking or eating. Si:ta 'Talkative, given to chat, communicative'. Likely related to ya:si:ta. Finally chis 'news, especially of murder or death. Intelligence of importance. Speech, harangue, hubbub, turmoil of voices in quarrels, language'. </div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 8:10 AM Haig, Geoffrey <<a href="mailto:geoffrey.haig@uni-bamberg.de" target="_blank">geoffrey.haig@uni-bamberg.de</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Here’s another reference on conceptualizations of ‘wordhood’, from a language documentation perspective:<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Peterson, John. 2011.
</span><span lang="EN-US"> "Words" in Kharia - Phonological, morpho-syntactic, and “orthographical” aspects. Geoffrey L.J. Haig, Nicole Nau, Stefan Schnell & Claudia Wegener (eds.), Documenting Endangered Languages. Achievements and Perspectives. Berlin / Boston:
De Gruyter Mouton (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 240). 89-119.</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)">**************************************<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)">Prof. Dr. Geoffrey Haig<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)">Lehrstuhl Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)">Institut fuer Orientalistik<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)">Universität Bamberg<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)">Tel. ++49 (0)951 863 2490<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)"><a href="https://www.uni-bamberg.de/aspra/team/aktuelles-team/prof-dr-geoffrey-haig/" target="_blank">https://www.uni-bamberg.de/aspra/team/aktuelles-team/prof-dr-geoffrey-haig/</a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="DE" style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Von:</span></b><span lang="DE" style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> Lingtyp <<a href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>>
<b>Im Auftrag von </b>JOO, Ian [Student]<br>
<b>Gesendet:</b> Freitag, 26. November 2021 11:54<br>
<b>An:</b> <a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a><br>
<b>Betreff:</b> Re: [Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Dear David,<br>
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thank you for introducing your interesting paper which I’ll have a look into soon.<br>
But, I don’t think speakers not employing spaces necessarily indicates the absence of wordhood.<br>
In many traditional orthographies, there are no spaces at all: Thai, Tibetan, Khmer, Japanese, pre-modern Korean, etc.<br>
But that wouldn’t necessarily mean that Thai speakers don’t perceive words.<br>
Many orthographies only transcribe consonants - but that wouldn’t mean that the speakers don’t perceive vowels as phonological units.<br>
So I think the emergence of spaces is sufficient, but not necessary, evidence of wordhood.</span><span lang="EN-US"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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Regards, <u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Ian<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">On 26 Nov 2021, 6:45 PM +0800, David Gil <<a href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank">gil@shh.mpg.de</a>>, wrote:<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">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?<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">(BTW, in Riau and many other dialects of Indonesian, the word for 'word',
<i>kata</i>, also means 'say'.)<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">David<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify">
<span lang="EN-US">Gil, David (2020) "What Does It Mean to Be an Isolating Language? The Case of Riau Indonesian", in D. Gil and A. Schapper eds.,
<i>Austronesian Undressed: How and Why Languages Become Isolating</i>, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 9-96.</span><span lang="EN-US"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">On 26/11/2021 12:11, Nikolaus P Himmelmann wrote:<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p>Hi<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">On 26/11/2021 10:17, JOO, Ian [Student] wrote:<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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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?<br>
It would be an interesting experiment. I’d be happy to be informed of any previous study who conducted such an experiment.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p>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.<u></u><u></u></p>
<p>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.<u></u><u></u></p>
<p>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.<u></u><u></u></p>
<p>Best<u></u><u></u></p>
<p>Nikolaus<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p><u></u> <u></u></p>
<pre>-- <u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre>David Gil<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre><u></u> <u></u></pre>
<pre>Senior Scientist (Associate)<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre>Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre>Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre>Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre><u></u> <u></u></pre>
<pre>Email: <a href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank">gil@shh.mpg.de</a><u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre>Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre>Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre><u></u> <u></u></pre>
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