[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Sun Nov 28 12:08:49 UTC 2021

dear Randy,

Interesting. Likewise, reading aloud was the norm in the West during
Antiquity, and through most of the Medieval period
<https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2015/01/29/read-to-yourself/>.
The first mention of silent reading in the West dates to late Antiquity.
Around 384 AD, Augustine of Hippo [St. Augustine] travelled to Milan, where
he met with Ambrose.  In his *Confessions*, he would later recall how
surprised he was to see Ambrose reading not aloud, but silently to himself:

“When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the
> meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could
> approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often,
> when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for
> he never read aloud.”

[original text
> <https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Confessiones/Liber_Sextus#6.3.3>, §6.3: *Sed
> cum legebat, oculi ducebantur per paginas et cor intellectum rimabatur, vox
> autem et lingua quiescebant. Saepe cum adessemus (non enim vetabatur
> quisquam ingredi aut ei venientem nuntiari mos erat), sic eum legentem
> vidimus tacite.*]

The most instructive aspect of this passage is probably Augustine's
surprise at a practice he had never witnessed before.
Alex
------------------------------

Alex François
LaTTiCe <http://www.lattice.cnrs.fr/en/alexandre-francois/> — CNRS–
<http://www.cnrs.fr/index.html>ENS
<https://www.ens.fr/laboratoire/lattice-langues-textes-traitements-informatiques-et-cognition-umr-8094>
–Sorbonne nouvelle
<http://www.univ-paris3.fr/lattice-langues-textes-traitements-informatiques-cognition-umr-8094-3458.kjsp>
Australian National University
<https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/francois-a>Academia.edu
<https://cnrs.academia.edu/AlexFran%C3%A7ois>
Personal homepage <http://alex.francois.online.fr/>
_________________________________________

On Sun, 28 Nov 2021 at 12:30, Randy J. LaPolla <randy.lapolla at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear Jocelyn,
>
>  I guess it's an hint
> indicating that the practice of silent reading in Chinese could be much
> older than the European practice.
>
>
> In China up to the 20th century, writing was read aloud (讀、念、誦、籀), and
> texts were memorized by reading aloud, so writing was to a large extent just
> a memory aid. (Cf. Goody & Watt, p. 316-17, 319). Even as late as the
> 1980’s, it was common in Chinese university campuses to hear a large number
> of students reading aloud early in morning. Y. R. Chao, the most famous
> Chinese linguist, was trained that way, and mentioned in his works that he
> felt it was a much better way to read and learn.
>
> In teaching texts were often not even explained, just memorized by
> reciting aloud, and a student didn't start writing (開筆) until after many
> years of memorizing texts in this way.
>
> By the way, I highly recommend Jack Goody & Ian Watt 1963, "The
> Consequences of Literacy" (Comparative Studies in Society and History 5.3:
> 304-345), on the differences between a literate and non-literate society
> and the different ways writing/reading can be understood.
> Randy
> ——
> Professor Randy J. LaPolla（罗仁地), PhD FAHA
> Center for Language Sciences
> Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences
> Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai Campus
> A302, Muduo Building, #18 Jinfeng Road, Zhuhai City, Guangdong, China
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> 语言科学研究中心
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 26 Nov 2021, at 7:25 PM, 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 <gil at shh.mpg.de>
> Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091
>
>
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