In my last video I talked about how one of the best ways to tell where syllable boundaries
are is by taking advantage of the fact that syllables never span multiple words. In response,
a lot of you brought up situations where syllables do appear to span multiple words, but all
of your examples seem to me to be great demonstrations of the fact that what does and doesn’t count
as a “word” is really fuzzy. In fact, when you ask questions like “where are their
boundaries” and “are they even a universal feature for all languages,” the answers
are even more complicated and contentious for words than they are for syllables.
Now, if I’m going to be talking about what does and doesn’t count as a word, I’m
going to have to bring up the most famous example of people just completely getting
it wrong: the myth that the inuit have hundreds or thousands or whatever different words for
snow. This idea brings up the really interesting fact that different languages do, in reality,
have different numbers of words for different things, and that examining these differences
might actually teach us a bit about our different cultures, but that’s not what I want to
talk about today. Because, the idea that the Eskimo-Aleut languages have radically more
words for snow than us is false. In reality, they actually have roughly as many words for
snow as English-Speaking professional skiers do, which is to say, like, five-ish. More
than most of us, but definitely not hundreds or thousands.
So, how did this myth start? Well, it comes from a misunderstanding of how the grammar
of these languages work. These languages have rules that allow you to easily combine smaller
words into larger words, and therefor tend to use a few big words instead of many smaller
ones. Languages like these are called polysynthetic, and sometimes have individual words that can
occupy the rolls of entire sentences in English. I’ll use Spanish as an example. Spanish
isn’t polysynthetic, not even close, but it does tend to contain more information per
word than English, so I think it’s a good place to start. Many of you might know that
Spanish verbs take different forms depending on who’s doing the thing. For instance,
the Spanish word “correr” means “to run,” but “I run” is “yo corro,”
“you run” is “tú corres,” “we run” is “nosotros corremos,” and so on. We
do this in English, to, but not nearly as much, in the present tense we only have two
forms for the word “run”: “runs” as in “he runs” for when there’s a single
third person doing the thing, and “run” for pretty much every other present tense
situation. Now, in Spanish, because you can tell from the suffix a lot of the time exactly
who’s doing the thing, the subject pronoun is often just dropped. Like, “yo corro”
is actually kind of redundant, because you can tell from the “-o” ending that it’s
me doing the running, so Spanish speakers will frequently just say “corro.”
And if you can just incorporate the subject of a sentence into the verb, there’s no
reason you can’t do the exact same thing with the object. For instance, Arabic has
different forms of the verb “to like” depending on who’s doing the liking, just
like in Spanish: “OHibb” for “I like,” “toHibb” for “you like,” “yoHibb”
for “he likes,” et cetera, but in the same way they have different forms of the
verb depending on what’s being liked. “OHibbuka” for “I like you,” “OHibbuha” for “I
like her,” and so on. This way, in Arabic, you can have single words that, all in one,
encompass the subject, predicate and object of a sentence.
Now, most languages have rules that change the verbs around depending on the subject
and/or object of the sentence, but polysynthetic languages, like the eskimo-aleut languages,
take things a step further. They have rules for combining adjectives into the nouns that
they describe, and combining adverbs into the verbs they describe, making them all one
word. So, if you want to talk about soft snow, you wouldn’t take the word for “snow”
and the word for “soft” and just put them next to each other, instead you would combine
them into a single word: softsnow. But, here we get into a pretty tricky problem:
what exactly is the difference between “soft snow” and “softsnow?” I think it’s
obvious from what I’ve described that different languages have very different relationships
with words, so how do we even know where words begin and end if different languages treat
them so differently? An easy way out would be to just look at the writing and look at
where the spaces are, but for one thing not all languages are written down, and even some
that are don’t write spaces between words, so unless all of these languages just don’t
have words, we’re going to need some other criteria.
Another common definition I hear a lot for words is that a word is the smallest unit
of language that can be said on it’s own and people will have some idea of what your
talking about. This is often contrasted with the idea of a “morpheme,” or the smallest
unit of a language that has meaning. For instance, the English word “hats” is composed of
two smaller morphemes, the morpheme “hat” which refers to these things, and the morpheme
“-s” which tells us that there’s more than one of them. Now, if I say “-s” all
on it’s own then you won’t think to yourself “oh yes, this is the thing that indicates
plural-ness,” not the same way I can say “hats” and you’ll think “this is the
noise that refers to these things,” so “hats” is a word and “-s” isn’t.
But, this definition gets a bit problematic when you look at grammar words. Like, I can
say “the baseball” and you’ll think of a baseball, but if I just say “the,”
what is the thing that you think of? What picture comes to mind, what memories does
it invoke? Maybe you think of some abstract concept of “the”-ness? But in that case,
there are some non-word morphemes that I can say where you’ll have a similar reaction,
I can say “anti-“ or “pre-“ or “ness” and there’s a good chance I’ll be able
to communicated some vague idea of “oppositeness,” or “before-ness” or “ness-ness.” This
gets into the issue of what it even means for something to “mean” anything, which
is a weird philosophical topic that is difficult to discuss and even harder to think about,
and I don’t really want to get into all that right now, so, are there any other criteria
that we can use to establish wordy-ness? Well, there are two big ones. The first is
that words tend to be able to move around relative to each other. So, one of the reasons
we know that “the” is a word and not a prefix is because I can say “the red baseball”
or “the tenderly cared for baseball” and it works just as well, even though the word
“the” is several leaps away from the word it’s describing. With suffixes and prefixes,
you can’t do that. The second criteria is that within a word,
different morphemes will often affect how others are pronounced, way more than just
between words. We see this in English with the “-s” suffix that makes things plural,
in the word “hats” it’s pronounced as an S “s” sound, but in the word “chairs”
it’s pronounced more as a Z “z” sound. What makes the difference is that the morpheme
“hat” ends in an unvoiced sound while “chair” ends in a voiced sound, and the
“-s” suffix changes it’s voiced-ness to match the sound that comes before it. This
fact, that the “-s” suffix changes pronunciation depending on its surroundings, indicates that
it’s probably a suffix and not a word. This is also one of the big reasons we think that
the inuit terms for different types of snow are single words instead of nouns followed
by adjectives: when you take a morpheme for snow and a morpheme that describes the snow
and put them together, all kinds of stuff will happen at the border between the two.
The sounds at the border will change to be more similar, or they might merge with each
other, or just get dropped entirely. All of this happens according to some very complicated
rules that I spent way to long reading about before I just gave up, so there’s a link
to a paper about it in the description if you want to know more.
Anyway, these three criteria are usually good enough for telling where words begin and end,
but there are cases where it still gets really fuzzy. In particular, there is a notorious
group of morphemes called “clitics.” The go to example in English is the “-s” suffix,
not the one we talked about before that makes things plural, but the one that indicates
possession. You know, like how “Bob” becomes “Bob’s” in the phrase “Bob’s house,”
or “street” becomes “street’s” in “the street’s name.” The weird thing
about this morpheme is that it’s pronounced like an s after unvoiced sounds and like a
z after voiced sounds, just like the plural “-s” suffix, but I can say “the cat’s
toy” just as easily as I can say “the cat that lives in the garage’s toy.” In
this way, it looks a lot like the word “the,” in that it’s describing a word that’s
several words away, but it’s still being pronounced as a “z” because it comes right
after the “j” sound in “garage,” not like an S like when it comes after the word
“cat,” suggesting that it’s just one morpheme inside the word “garage’s.”
Things like these, that are pronounced like they’re not their own word but move around
as if they are, are called “clitics,” and they’re a big reason that what makes
a word a word is still an ongoing debate today. Alright, so, this makes two videos in a row
titled “what even is a blank,” so, might as well make it a trilogy. Next time I’ll
be skipping up the latter of linguistics a little bit and asking the question: what even
is a language? See yah then.