[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Sun Nov 28 08:02:08 UTC 2021

Dear All,

The Atong language of Northeast India has no indigenous word for ‘word’,
but uses a loanword from one of the surrounding Indic language, *kata ~
khata ~ katha ~ khatha *(the variation in aspiration being a good indicator
of its being a loan). This word is also used with the meaning ‘story’, i.e.
‘someone’s words’, or ‘words of something’. The question arises, what does
a speaker use the notion of ‘word’ for in life. Atongs come into contact
with several different languages in their daily lives. When talking to me
about the differences in vocabulary between Atong and these languages, they
never used the word *katha*. They just said that something like “they say
X, in Atong it is Y” or some other expressions. The word *katha* with the
meaning ‘word’ only came up during translation sessions, when I sat down
with my translator to translate the Atong texts I had collected into
English. An interesting observation I found while doing fieldwork is that
the friend who transcribed my recorded texts seems to have had an intuitive
and quite consistent notion of what a written word should look like on
paper, which turned out to be, with a few, also consistent exceptions, the
phonological word.

Regards,

Seino
__________________
Dr. Seino van Breugel
https://independent.academia.edu/SeinovanBreugel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHfiZwqyWC7HfZUAQ1RH1ew

On Sun, Nov 28, 2021 at 5:41 AM David Nash <david.nash at anu.edu.au> wrote:

> Further on this, as you suggest Ian, care has to be taken as to whether
> the 'word for “word”' is polysemous, or ranges more widely than we might
> expect.  Even English 'word' does in some contexts (as in "I took him at
> his word.")  Another relevant reference:
>
> Goddard, Cliff. 2011. The lexical semantics of language (with special
> reference to words). *Language Sciences* 33.1, 40-57.
> http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2010.03.003
>
> David
>
>
> On 26/11/21 20:17, JOO, Ian [Student] wrote:
>
> Dear Martin,
>
> Thanks for citing this chapter.
> I did some quick search to see if it’s true that “only some” languages
> have a word for “word”.
> For example, in the World Loanword Database, it seems that most of the 41
> sample languages have a word for “word”, and more than half of them have a
> native word for it.
> https://wold.clld.org/meaning/18-26#2/32.2/-4.8
> <https://aus01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwold.clld.org%2Fmeaning%2F18-26%232%2F32.2%2F-4.8&data=04%7C01%7Cdavid.nash%40anu.edu.au%7C0358502990c943f7416408d9b0bdac2b%7Ce37d725cab5c46249ae5f0533e486437%7C0%7C0%7C637735152318739129%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=r1JnumGj7Vd4vqWdbSjqozgFE35C10g2a%2FLBc0mJ6W4%3D&reserved=0>
> Also in the CLICS3 database, many languages seem to have one or more
> “word”-words, although I can’t be sure if they are native or not.
> https://clics.clld.org/parameters/1599
> <https://aus01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fclics.clld.org%2Fparameters%2F1599&data=04%7C01%7Cdavid.nash%40anu.edu.au%7C0358502990c943f7416408d9b0bdac2b%7Ce37d725cab5c46249ae5f0533e486437%7C0%7C0%7C637735152318749083%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=uOeSkU9wVP5THDZ%2FXHoiij%2FhHjWJB17MPdH5W9rrOyU%3D&reserved=0>
> On the other hand, my native language, Korean, doesn’t have a
> monomorphemic “word”-word. The common words for “word”, tan-e and nath-mal,
> are both compounds (‘piece-speech’), and I suspect them to be fairly
> recently coined or borrowed.
> But the real question would be whether all these words for “word”
> designate roughly the same concept.
> In many languages, the word for “word” seems to be co-lexified with
> “speech” (such as Latin *verbum* or Japanese *koto-ba*).
> 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.
>
> Regards,
> Ian
> On 26 Nov 2021, 2:56 PM +0800, Martin Haspelmath
> <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de> <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>, wrote:
>
> I felt that Dixon & Aikhenvald's (2002) introductory chapter was very
> interesting:
>
> Dixon, R. M. W & Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2002. Word: A typological
> framework. In Dixon, R. M.W & Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (eds.), *Word: A
> cross-linguistic typology*, 1–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
>
> Thy say (p. 2-3) that "it appears that only some languages actually have a
> lexeme with the meaning ‘word’... The vast majority of languages spoken by
> small tribal groups (with from a few hundred to a few thousand speakers)
> have a lexeme meaning ‘(proper) name’ but none have the meaning ‘word’."
>
> Even Latin does not have a single word for 'word' (there is *verbum*,
> *vox*, *sermo*, and *dictio*, the latter a technical calque from Greek
> *léxis*).
>
> (Dixon & Aikhenvald's 2002 paper was a major inspiration for my 2011 paper
> on the indeterminacy of word segmentation.)
>
> Martin
>
> Am 26.11.21 um 07:16 schrieb JOO, Ian [Student]:
>
> Dear typologists,
>
> As you may know already, the concept of “word” is notoriously hard to
> define.
> Without getting into that, is the concept of wordhood attested
> cross-linguistically?
> In other words, do people with different language backgrounds believe that
> there is such a thing as a “word”, and do what people perceive as a “word”
> tend to be roughly the same concept?
> Which boils down to two questions:
>
>    1. Do many languages have a native, monomorphemic word for “word”?
>    2. If so, do these words for “word” refer to roughly the same (or, at
>    least, similar) concept?
>
> I would like to examine whether wordhood is a psychological reality shared
> by speakers of different languages.
>
> Regards,
> Ian
>
>
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> --
> Martin Haspelmath
> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
> Deutscher Platz 6
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