[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

[Matthew Windsor]

I don't think anyone has mentioned Dixon, Aikhenvald and White's more
recent (2020) volume, *Phonological word and grammatical word*:* A
cross-linguistic typology*. Section four of the introduction
<https://www.academia.edu/44931049/The_essence_of_word> offers some remarks
defending the validity of 'word' as "a minimal pronounceable unit which
makes sense to speakers."

I can also comment briefly on the Cree syllabary mentioned by Daniel, which
was invented by a missionary linguist but also quickly indigenized and used
by a few generations of monolingual Cree and Ojibwe speakers. There are
different conventions between communities for the location of orthographic
spaces. In the community where I work, Oji-Cree (Ojibwe) speakers generally
keep the long grammatical words together, with optional spaces at
predictable places within/after strings of 'preverbs' (prefixes with rigid
ordering but which form phonological units). The spaces are inserted when a
word is judged visually confusing (ᑭᑮ ᑭᑭᓑᑳᐣ) or "too long" to be easily
readable.

-- 


*Matt Windsor*

Linguistics & Translation | SIL

ᐃᐦᑭᑐᐃᐧᐣ ᑮᐊᓂᔑᓂᓃᐃᐧ ᒦᓇ ᑭᑮᐃᐧᒋᐊᔮᒥᑯᓈᐣ.
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