[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Fri Nov 26 11:31:21 UTC 2021

Dear Aznar,

I meant spaces between words. There are blank "spaces" between each character, of course, just not at word or syllable level.
Below is Korean when it was first written: each character (representing a syllable) is equally separated from each other.

[cid:6C216A0178F14CC3A29D4F8785B65C32]

Regards,
Ian
On 26 Nov 2021, 7:26 PM +0800, Jocelyn Aznar <contact at jocelynaznar.eu>, wrote:
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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