[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Fri Nov 26 11:25:51 UTC 2021

Dear Ian,

I'm not sure what you mean by Thai, Tibetan, Khmer, Japanese, pre-modern
Korean not having spaces. I mean, ok you don't have to type them as
such, but there are white spaces between the characters, they are just
not systematically indicating the word boundaries but can also other
make obvious other linguistic phenomena/cues, like syllables, sounds,
semantic traits, etc.

People looking at the history of writing (like Paul Saenger's Space
Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading [the text was criticized on
the accuracy of historical account but, not on the general thesis as far
as I'm aware]) showed the relationship between typography and the
practice of reading, like for instance being able to read silently, a
practice that was very restricted first and got more common in Europe
during the XVIIe century (if I remember well). Some historians also
report on how reading aloud or silently affect how people interpreting
differently the relationship between the texts and its narrator (here to
be understood from Gérard Genette's narratologic conception, that is the
narrator as the character telling a story, not the actual person
writing/telling it).

I guess for SMS messages in Riau Indonesian, people were first to read
them aloud while writing. And now that they integrated spaces as a
character, they should write them without reading them aloud.

This topic about white spaces also reminds me how some French colleagues
who were quite fluent in Mandarin Chinese reported that it was faster
for them to read a text in Chinese than in French, as you mostly didn't
speak (in your head) the text while reading it. I guess it's an hint
indicating that the practice of silent reading in Chinese could be much
older than the European practice.

Best,
Jocelyn

Le 26/11/2021 à 11:54, JOO, Ian [Student] a écrit :
> Dear David,
> 
> thank you for introducing your interesting paper which I’ll have a look
> into soon.
> But, I don’t think speakers not employing spaces necessarily indicates
> the absence of wordhood.
> In many traditional orthographies, there are no spaces at all: Thai,
> Tibetan, Khmer, Japanese, pre-modern Korean, etc.
> But that wouldn’t necessarily mean that Thai speakers don’t perceive words.
> Many orthographies only transcribe consonants - but that wouldn’t mean
> that the speakers don’t perceive vowels as phonological units.
> So I think the emergence of spaces is sufficient, but not necessary,
> evidence of wordhood.
> 
> Regards,
> Ian
> On 26 Nov 2021, 6:45 PM +0800, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de>, wrote:
>> 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?
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> (BTW, in Riau and many other dialects of Indonesian, the word for
>> 'word', /kata/, also means 'say'.)
>>
>> David
>>
>> Gil, David (2020) "What Does It Mean to Be an Isolating Language? The
>> Case of Riau Indonesian", in D. Gil and A. Schapper eds.,
>> /Austronesian Undressed: How and Why Languages Become Isolating/, John
>> Benjamins, Amsterdam, 9-96.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 26/11/2021 12:11, Nikolaus P Himmelmann wrote:
>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> On 26/11/2021 10:17, JOO, Ian [Student] wrote:
>>>>
>>>> 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?
>>>> It would be an interesting experiment. I’d be happy to be informed
>>>> of any previous study who conducted such an experiment.
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> Best
>>>
>>> Nikolaus
>>>
>>
>>
>> --  
>> David Gil
>>
>> Senior Scientist (Associate)
>> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
>> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
>> Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany
>>
>> Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
>> Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
>> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091
>>
> 
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