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This is a really interesting thread! It still seems to me that the
term "word" has a well-understood orthographic sense, but no
well-understood general phonological or morphosyntactic sense.
Writing is now almost universal, but it does appear that most
unwritten languages did not have a word for 'word' (as opposed to
'speech' or 'what someone said').<br>
<br>
I agree with Ian that "the emergence of spaces is sufficient
evidence of wordhood", in the sense of orthographic wordhood –
because spaces define orthographic words.<br>
<br>
As the fascinating discussion of the history of reading has made
clear, reading is by no means a straightforward or natural activity.
It's more like riding a bike – extremely useful, but dependent on
highly specific cultural traditions and practices.<br>
<br>
It may well be that orthographic spaces are primarily an autonomous
device to facilitate reading, like punctuation, paragraphs, section
headings, and typographical ascenders/descenders in Latin script –
but with no direct relationship to anything in the spoken language.
As our grammatical investigations began with written language (<i>gram-matica</i>
originally means 'study of writing', cf. <i>graph-</i> 'write'), it
is natural that it was based on the study of written language. <i>Sciptio
continua</i> may simply be a bit harder to read than spaced
writing (just as I find Cyrillic a bit harder to read than Latin,
because there are fewer ascenders/descenders).<br>
<br>
So I'm not sure if we can presuppose that spaces between words tell
us anything about non-written language structure.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Martin<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Am 26.11.21 um 11:54 schrieb JOO, Ian
[Student]:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:d88966a3-c488-4b53-b828-d830dcd24dde@Spark">
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<div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Dear
David,</span><br>
<br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">thank you for
introducing your interesting paper which I’ll have a look
into soon.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">But, I don’t think
speakers not employing spaces necessarily indicates the
absence of wordhood.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">In many traditional
orthographies, there are no spaces at all: Thai, Tibetan,
Khmer, Japanese, pre-modern Korean, etc.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">But that wouldn’t
necessarily mean that Thai speakers don’t perceive words.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Many orthographies
only transcribe consonants - but that wouldn’t mean that the
speakers don’t perceive vowels as phonological units.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">So I think the
emergence of spaces is sufficient, but not necessary,
evidence of wordhood.</span></div>
</div>
<div name="messageSignatureSection"><br>
Regards,
<div dir="auto">Ian</div>
</div>
<div name="messageReplySection">On 26 Nov 2021, 6:45 PM +0800,
David Gil <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de"><gil@shh.mpg.de></a>, wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite" style="border-left-color: grey;
border-left-width: thin; border-left-style: solid; margin: 5px
5px;padding-left: 10px;">
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">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?</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">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.</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">(BTW, in Riau and many other
dialects of Indonesian, the word for 'word',
<i>kata</i>, also means 'say'.)</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">David</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-left:27.0pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:
-27.0pt">
<span
style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times
New Roman",serif;
mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language:JA">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></p>
<style></style></div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 26/11/2021 12:11, Nikolaus P
Himmelmann wrote:</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:c36ff045-24fa-44ae-4468-c65128f9bf03@uni-koeln.de">
<p>Hi<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 26/11/2021 10:17, JOO, Ian
[Student] wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:f3bf0245-64cd-43f5-a5a5-0af9222c73ba@Spark">
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<div dir="auto"><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>
</div>
</blockquote>
<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.</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.</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.<br>
</p>
<p>Best</p>
<p>Nikolaus<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
David Gil
Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany
Email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated moz-txt-link-freetext" href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de" moz-do-not-send="true">gil@shh.mpg.de</a>
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
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