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<div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Dear Martin,</span><br>
<br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Thanks for citing this chapter.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">I did some quick search to see if it’s true that “only some” languages have a word for “word”.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">For example, in the World Loanword Database, it seems that most of the 41 sample languages have a word for “word”, and more than half of them have a native word for it.</span><br>
<a href="https://wold.clld.org/meaning/18-26#2/32.2/-4.8" target="_blank">https://wold.clld.org/meaning/18-26#2/32.2/-4.8</a><br>
Also in the CLICS3 database, many languages seem to have one or more “word”-words, although I can’t be sure if they are native or not.<br>
<a href="https://clics.clld.org/parameters/1599" target="_blank">https://clics.clld.org/parameters/1599</a><br>
On the other hand, my native language, Korean, doesn’t have a monomorphemic “word”-word. The common words for “word”, tan-e and nath-mal, are both compounds (‘piece-speech’), and I suspect them to be fairly recently coined or borrowed.<br>
But the real question would be whether all these words for “word” designate roughly the same concept.<br>
In many languages, the word for “word” seems to be co-lexified with “speech” (such as Latin <em>verbum</em> or Japanese <em>koto-ba</em>).<br>
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.</div>
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Regards,
<div dir="auto">Ian</div>
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<div name="messageReplySection">On 26 Nov 2021, 2:56 PM +0800, Martin Haspelmath <martin_haspelmath@eva.mpg.de>, wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite" style="border-left-color: grey; border-left-width: thin; border-left-style: solid; margin: 5px 5px;padding-left: 10px;">
I felt that Dixon & Aikhenvald's (2002) introductory chapter was very interesting:<br>
<br>
<div class="csl-bib-body" style="line-height: 1.35; margin-left: 2em; text-indent:-2em;">
<div class="csl-entry">Dixon, R. M. W & Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2002. Word: A typological framework. In Dixon, R. M.W & Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (eds.),
<i>Word: A cross-linguistic typology</i>, 1–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</div>
<span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=bookitem&rft.atitle=Word%3A%20A%20typological%20framework&rft.place=Cambridge&rft.publisher=Cambridge%20University%20Press&rft.aufirst=R.%20M.%20W&rft.aulast=Dixon&rft.au=R.%20M.%20W%20Dixon&rft.au=Alexandra%20Y%20Aikhenvald&rft.au=R.%20M.W%20Dixon&rft.au=Alexandra%20Y%20Aikhenvald&rft.date=2002&rft.pages=1%20%E2%80%93%2041&rft.spage=1%20&rft.epage=%2041"></span></div>
<br>
Thy say (p. 2-3) that "it appears that only some languages actually have a lexeme with the meaning ‘word’... The vast majority of languages spoken by small tribal groups (with from a few hundred to a few thousand speakers) have a lexeme meaning ‘(proper) name’
but none have the meaning ‘word’."<br>
<br>
Even Latin does not have a single word for 'word' (there is <i>verbum</i>, <i>vox</i>,
<i>sermo</i>, and <i>dictio</i>, the latter a technical calque from Greek <i>léxis</i>).<br>
<br>
(Dixon & Aikhenvald's 2002 paper was a major inspiration for my 2011 paper on the indeterminacy of word segmentation.)<br>
<br>
Martin<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Am 26.11.21 um 07:16 schrieb JOO, Ian [Student]:<br>
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<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:27795b84-8c76-49e6-b41c-ed4b87fc3b7e@Spark">
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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>
<ol type="1">
<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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