<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On 29 Nov 2021, at 12:28 AM, Martin Haspelmath <<a href="mailto:martin_haspelmath@eva.mpg.de" class="">martin_haspelmath@eva.mpg.de</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><meta charset="UTF-8" class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">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').</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">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.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">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.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">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 (</span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class="">gram-matica</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">originally means 'study of writing', cf.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class="">graph-</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;" class=""><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>'write'), it is natural that it was based on the study of written language.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class="">Sciptio continua</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;" class=""><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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).</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">So I'm not sure if we can presuppose that spaces between words tell us anything about non-written language structure.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">Best,</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">Martin</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><div class="moz-cite-prefix" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Am 26.11.21 um 11:54 schrieb JOO, Ian [Student]:<br class=""></div><blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:d88966a3-c488-4b53-b828-d830dcd24dde@Spark" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><div name="messageBodySection" class=""><div dir="auto" class=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";" class="">Dear David,</span><br class=""><br class=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";" class="">thank you for introducing your interesting paper which I’ll have a look into soon.</span><br class=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";" class="">But, I don’t think speakers not employing spaces necessarily indicates the absence of wordhood.</span><br class=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";" class="">In many traditional orthographies, there are no spaces at all: Thai, Tibetan, Khmer, Japanese, pre-modern Korean, etc.</span><br class=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";" class="">But that wouldn’t necessarily mean that Thai speakers don’t perceive words.</span><br class=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";" class="">Many orthographies only transcribe consonants - but that wouldn’t mean that the speakers don’t perceive vowels as phonological units.</span><br class=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";" class="">So I think the emergence of spaces is sufficient, but not necessary, evidence of wordhood.</span></div></div><div name="messageSignatureSection" class=""><br class="">Regards,<div dir="auto" class="">Ian</div></div><div name="messageReplySection" class="">On 26 Nov 2021, 6:45 PM +0800, David Gil<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de"><gil@shh.mpg.de></a>, wrote:<br class=""><blockquote type="cite" style="border-left-color: grey; border-left-width: thin; border-left-style: solid; margin: 5px; padding-left: 10px;" class=""><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 class=""></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 class=""></div><div class="moz-cite-prefix">(BTW, in Riau and many other dialects of Indonesian, the word for 'word',<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i class="">kata</i>, also means 'say'.)</div><div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br class=""></div><div class="moz-cite-prefix">David</div><div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br class=""></div><div class="moz-cite-prefix"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: -27pt;"><span class="">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 class="">Austronesian Undressed: How and Why Languages Become Isolating</i>, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 9-96.</span></p></div><div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br class=""></div><div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br class=""></div><div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 26/11/2021 12:11, Nikolaus P Himmelmann wrote:</div><div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br class=""></div><blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:c36ff045-24fa-44ae-4468-c65128f9bf03@uni-koeln.de" class=""><p class="">Hi<br class=""></p><div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 26/11/2021 10:17, JOO, Ian [Student] wrote:<br class=""></div><blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:f3bf0245-64cd-43f5-a5a5-0af9222c73ba@Spark" class=""><div name="messageBodySection" class=""><div dir="auto" class=""><br class="">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 class="">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 class="">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 class="">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 class="">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 class=""></p><p class="">Best</p><p class="">Nikolaus<br class=""></p></blockquote><p class=""><br class=""></p><p class=""><br class=""></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>
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</pre></blockquote><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""><pre class="moz-signature" cols="72" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;">--
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
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