<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Just a brief thought I just had about “word” and spaces: In the Rawang (Tibeto-Burman, Kachin State, Myanmar) orthography, spaces are used between “words”, but the “words” are not necessarily individual grammatical words or lexical words, as they can just be combinations of affixal morphology that due to the prosody get pronounced separately from the items they actually modify and would be attached to in other prosodic contexts (e.g. the first person marker -ng (-ŋ) seen in (2) below usually is suffixed to the verb), e.g. in the following examples, the “words” in bold are combinations of grammatical morphemes, and so form phonological “words", but are not lexical items, just chunks of speech.<br class=""><br class=""><div class=""><i class="">1. èdv́ngké <b class="">bǿshà</b>.</i> <br class=""> è-dv́ng-ké bǿ-shà <br class=""> N.1-finish-eat PFV-1plpast <br class=""> ‘(They) defeated us.’ <br class=""><br class=""><i class="">2. Tı̀ tiqgwı̀n èyok <b class="">ngāng ngvtnà</b>.</i><br class=""> tı̀ tiq-gwı̀n è-yuq ng-ā-ng ng-vt-à<br class=""> water one-cup N.1-scoop 1sg-BEN-1sg 1sg-DIR+1sg-TR.PAST<br class=""> 'Bring (scoop) me a cup of water.’ <br class=""><br class="">Btw, Rawang has a word for ‘language, speech, word, what was said’, <i class="">kà,</i> that can also be used as a classifier for units of speech, but it isn’t limited to any particular size unit.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Randy<br class=""><div class=""><div dir="auto" style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><span style="font-size: 13px;" class="">——</span><br style="font-size: 13px;" class=""><span style="font-size: 13px;" class="">Professor Randy J. LaPolla（罗仁地), PhD FAHA </span><br style="font-size: 13px;" class=""><span style="font-size: 13px;" class="">Center for Language Sciences</span><br style="font-size: 13px;" class=""><span style="font-size: 13px;" class="">Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences</span><br style="font-size: 13px;" class=""><span style="font-size: 13px;" class="">Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai Campus</span><br style="font-size: 13px;" class=""><span style="font-size: 13px;" class="">A302, Muduo Building, #18 Jinfeng Road, Zhuhai City, Guangdong, China</span><br style="font-size: 13px;" class=""><br style="font-size: 13px;" class=""><div style="font-size: 13px;">邮编：519000<br class="">广东省珠海市唐家湾镇金凤路18号木铎楼A302<br class="">北京师范大学珠海校区<br class="">人文和社会科学高等研究院<br class="">语言科学研究中心 </div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></div><blockquote type="cite" class="">On 29 Nov 2021, at 2:22 PM, Matthew Windsor <<a href="mailto:matthew_windsor@sil.org" class="">matthew_windsor@sil.org</a>> wrote:<br class=""><br class="">I don't think anyone has mentioned Dixon, Aikhenvald and White's more recent (2020) volume, Phonological word and grammatical word: A cross-linguistic typology. Section four of the introduction offers some remarks defending the validity of 'word' as "a minimal pronounceable unit which makes sense to speakers." <br class=""><br class="">I can also comment briefly on the Cree syllabary mentioned by Daniel, which was invented by a missionary linguist but also quickly indigenized and used by a few generations of monolingual Cree and Ojibwe speakers. There are different conventions between communities for the location of orthographic spaces. In the community where I work, Oji-Cree (Ojibwe) speakers generally keep the long grammatical words together, with optional spaces at predictable places within/after strings of 'preverbs' (prefixes with rigid ordering but which form phonological units). The spaces are inserted when a word is judged visually confusing (ᑭᑮ ᑭᑭᓑᑳᐣ) or "too long" to be easily readable.<br class=""><br class="">-- <br class=""><br class=""><br class="">Matt Windsor<br class=""><br class="">Linguistics & Translation | SIL<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">ᐃᐦᑭᑐᐃᐧᐣ ᑮᐊᓂᔑᓂᓃᐃᐧ ᒦᓇ ᑭᑮᐃᐧᒋᐊᔮᒥᑯᓈᐣ.<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">_______________________________________________<br class="">Lingtyp mailing list<br class=""><a href="mailto:Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" class="">Lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a><br class="">http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<br class=""></blockquote><br class=""></div><br class=""><br class=""><div class="">
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