<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"><style data-m2k-style="">html,body{height:100%;}body{box-sizing:border-box;padding:8px;margin:0;}</style></head><body><div>As far as I can tell, Chinese has two terms, one meaning roughly 'morpheme' and the other meaning roughly 'word'. Part of the problem is, at least in Mandarin Chinese they are *very similar* in pronunciation!</div><div><br></div><div>'zi' means, more or less literally, what in English is usually referred to as a 'character' in the Hanzi writing system. It is always a single syllable; in almost all cases, it corresponds to a single morpheme, in the more-or-less strict linguistic sense.</div><div><br></div><div>'ci' refers to a commonly-occurring combination of two (perhaps occasionally 3?) 'zi', which combination has a distinctive meaning, and therefore corresponds fairly closely to what we would consider a (multimorphemic) word.</div><div><br></div><div>'zi' is BY FAR the more commonly-used term in ordinary usage. I have found that when I try (in *spoken* Chinese) to use 'ci', my students almost always mishear this as 'zi'.</div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Steven</div><div><br>
-----Original message-----<br>
<b>From:</b>JOO, Ian [Student]<ian.joo@connect.polyu.hk><br>
<b>To:</b>LINGTYP<lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org><br>
<b>Date: </b> Fri, 26 Nov 2021 14:16:30<br>
<b>Subject:</b> [Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”<br>
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<div dir="auto">Dear typologists,<br>
<br>
As you may know already, the concept of “word” is notoriously hard to define.<br>
Without getting into that, is the concept of wordhood attested cross-linguistically?<br>
In other words, do people with different language backgrounds believe that there is such a thing as a “word”, and do what people perceive as a “word” tend to be roughly the same concept?<br>
Which boils down to two questions:</div>
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<li>Do many languages have a native, monomorphemic word for “word”?</li><li>If so, do these words for “word” refer to roughly the same (or, at least, similar) concept?</li></ol>
<div dir="auto">I would like to examine whether wordhood is a psychological reality shared by speakers of different languages.</div>
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Regards,
<div dir="auto">Ian</div>
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