Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary


"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...

Mok-Kong Shen wrote:

me wrote:
Mok-Kong Shen wrote:

So could you kindly explain what do you mean by "word"
in general in a (any) language?

Can there be a meaning in general? Malayalam doesn't even have a single
word
for "word"; it has the words vacanam and vAkku. While vacanam is used
only
by the intellgensia, it's useful in that vacanam and vAkku can take on
different shades of meaning; "liver disease" might be called an inglish
vacanam (English term) whereas its Chinese equivalent would be called a
cIna vAkku (Chinese word). It's presumably the space in "liver disease"
that would disqualify it from being a vAkku; unlike hRydrOgam (the
Malayalam for heart disease from the morphemes hRydayam=heart and
rOgam=disease) has no spaces and would be a vAkku. On the other hand, a
lack of spaces doesn't necessarily imply a vakku; hRydrOgamumillAttadu
meaning "not having heart disease either" would not be a single vAkku;
it
would conceivably be a vacanam.

I think in the case you mentioned, one could think of an
analogy in connection to a certain language (in my vague
rememberance of what I was told) where instead of the
word "snow" there are words for various different kinds
of snow. The existence of two "sub-words" (let's call that)
but non-existence of "word" doesn't preclude the usage of
the English "word" in a discussion in English(!) to refer
to an arbitrary element of the union of the sets referred
to by these two terms, I suppose.

Sheesh, now he drags in "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax," which (a)
isn't true and (2) has nothing to do with either the question or what
he's talking about. Here he's talking about superordinate terms.

English, BTW, has the same number of different roots for snow-like
phenomena as "Eskimo" has, and can make as many new ones as it needs
with exactly the same mechanisms as "Eskimo," viz., derivation and
compounding.

Wrong. Unlike English (and Chinese), Eskimo doesn't have compounding at
all. Every Eskimo word contains a single root morpheme, plus (usually) lots
of derivational and inflectional suffixes. None of the suffixes are roots
or "words" in themselves. There are no compound nouns in Eskimo.

I'm sure the OP wasn't referring to the GEVH, but, rather, was trying to say
that some language doesn't have a single morpheme with essentially the same
range of meaning as English "snow". I can well imagine that a language
might have different, unrelated, non-interchangeable words, one for falling
or blowing snow and the other for snow lying on the ground. (The Eskimo
languages don't seem to be such, FWIW -- in Yupik, for example, the morpheme
"qan-" is the root used in the verb "to snow" and also in several of the
nouns for "snow", some meaning snow in the air, and others snow on the
ground -- like in English, where "snow-" is part of many of our compound
snow-words with both meanings.)

As for Chinese, Ramsay tells us that "the Chinese have no everyday word for
'word' ", which is what the OP seems to be getting at. The common word
<zi4> (what the OP writes as "tze") means syllable, or character, or (more
or less) morpheme. However according to Norman, modern Chinese linguists do
have a technical word for "word", namely <ci>. (I don't know what the tone
is.)

John.


.

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