[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

[Guillaume Jacques]

Similarly, in some early sources on Algonquian languages, the person
indexation/possessive prefixes are sometimes separated from the verb stem
by a space, including the -t- that occurs when they precede vowel-initial
stems:

Études philologiques sur quelques langues sauvages de l'Amérique : Cuoq, J.
A. (Jean André), 1821-1898 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming :
Internet Archive <https://archive.org/details/bp_991175/page/47/mode/2up>

I wonder if this is due to the influence of French spacing conventions, in
particular, the fact that French orthography treats as distinct words the
"clitic pronouns", which are synchronically best treated as indexation
prefixes if we forget about the writing system.

On a related topic, some ancient languages such as Ugaritic and Old Persian
had word separators other than space.

Guillaume

Le lun. 29 nov. 2021 à 08:48, Randy J. LaPolla <randy.lapolla at gmail.com> a
écrit :

> Just a brief thought I just had about “word” and spaces: In the Rawang
> (Tibeto-Burman, Kachin State, Myanmar) orthography, spaces are used between
> “words”, but the “words” are not necessarily individual grammatical words
> or lexical words, as they can just be combinations of affixal morphology
> that due to the prosody get pronounced separately from the items they
> actually modify and would be attached to in other prosodic contexts (e.g.
> the first person marker -ng (-ŋ) seen in (2) below usually is suffixed to
> the verb), e.g. in the following examples, the “words” in bold are
> combinations of grammatical morphemes, and so form phonological “words",
> but are not lexical items, just chunks of speech.
>
> *1. èdv́ngké bǿshà.*
>     è-dv́ng-ké        bǿ-shà
>     N.1-finish-eat   PFV-1plpast
>     ‘(They) defeated us.’
>
> *2. Tı̀ tiqgwı̀n èyok ngāng ngvtnà.*
>     tı̀         tiq-gwı̀n   è-yuq        ng-ā-ng        ng-vt-à
>     water   one-cup   N.1-scoop 1sg-BEN-1sg  1sg-DIR+1sg-TR.PAST
>    'Bring (scoop) me a cup of water.’
>
> Btw, Rawang has a word for ‘language, speech, word, what was said’, *kà,* that
> can also be used as a classifier for units of speech, but it isn’t limited
> to any particular size unit.
>
> 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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> 北京师范大学珠海校区
> 人文和社会科学高等研究院
> 语言科学研究中心
>
> On 29 Nov 2021, at 2:22 PM, Matthew Windsor <matthew_windsor at sil.org>
> wrote:
>
> 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 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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-- 
Guillaume Jacques

Directeur de recherches
CNRS (CRLAO) - EPHE- INALCO
https://scholar.google.fr/citations?user=1XCp2-oAAAAJ&hl=fr
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/295
<http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques>
http://panchr.hypotheses.org/
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