[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

[Jess Tauber]

Yahgan (genetic isolate from Tierra del Fuego, currently critically
endangered) had several terms for 'word'.  ku:ta:na (colon marks tenseness
of vowel preceding it) meant 'Language, speech, saying, word, a discourse',
but as a verb also meant 'to speak, to say, utter, pronounce, to talk,
preach, harangue'.  Then the related simplex, listed as gu:ta, means
'language, speech, word, pronounceable word'.  Ha:sha (sh voiceless hushing
fricative) 'voice, language, uttered words, speech. Breath(ing). Cry,
utterance'.  bvma;na (v schwa) 'to mention, speak of, to speak of one's
intentions, wishes'. and 'to say, speak, detail, give an account of any
plan. To bray, as penguins'.   As noun- 'language, conversation, talk,
gossip'.  Wa:pa(n) 'a name, a word'.  Note also ya:pi:mata 'to talk, chat,
speak, converse, to talk with or to', and ya:pis/ya:pvs 'talkative, noisy,
given to gossip, forward with talk'. Yau(i)s (probably etymologically
related to ya:pis) 'false, deceitful, a lie, (given to) lying'.  Ya:si:ta
'noisy, talkative, forward of speech, given to gossip, false tongued' (-ta
is an adjective suffix referring to some proclivity).  Also likely related
etymologically to ya:pis, yauis.  Note that the language exhibits a strong
tendency towards 'bipartite constructions' (though here it's more
'tripartite', with some instrumental/manner-of-action/body part prefix on
the verb, followed by the main verb (which can be serialized), and finally
position/pathway suffixes. ya- refers to the mouth or leading edge of
something, and is found in a good number of complexes referring to talking
or eating.  Si:ta 'Talkative, given to chat, communicative'. Likely related
to ya:si:ta.   Finally chis 'news, especially of murder or death.
Intelligence of importance. Speech, harangue, hubbub, turmoil of voices in
quarrels, language'.

On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 8:10 AM Haig, Geoffrey <geoffrey.haig at uni-bamberg.de>
wrote:

> Here’s another reference on conceptualizations of ‘wordhood’, from a
> language documentation perspective:
>
>
>
> Peterson, John. 2011.  "Words" in Kharia - Phonological,
> morpho-syntactic, and “orthographical” aspects. Geoffrey L.J. Haig, Nicole
> Nau, Stefan Schnell & Claudia Wegener (eds.), Documenting Endangered
> Languages. Achievements and Perspectives. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter
> Mouton (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 240). 89-119.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> **************************************
>
> Prof. Dr. Geoffrey Haig
>
> Lehrstuhl Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
>
> Institut fuer Orientalistik
>
> Universität Bamberg
>
> Schillerplatz 17
>
> 96047 Bamberg
>
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>
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>
> *Von:* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> *Im Auftrag
> von *JOO, Ian [Student]
> *Gesendet:* Freitag, 26. November 2021 11:54
> *An:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> *Betreff:* Re: [Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”
>
>
>
> 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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