[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Sun Nov 28 16:12:35 UTC 2021

Yes it did. Thanks, Alex!

Marianne

On Sun, Nov 28, 2021 at 6:20 AM Randy LaPolla <randy.lapolla at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks very much, Alex! That’s very interesting! Nice evidence of the
> practice. Hope it went to the list.
>
> All the best,
> Randy
>
> Sent from my phone
>
> On 28 Nov 2021, at 8:09 PM, Alex Francois <alex.francois.cnrs at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> 
> 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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>> 人文和社会科学高等研究院
>> 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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