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Slurred languages vs clear languages | ||
Tags: Comprehension/understanding | Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5454 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 25 of 55 17 May 2012 at 12:40am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
True enough, but some languages have clearer boundaries between syllables (and thus between words) than others.
It's a complicated convention if you look at phonology and phonetics only, but as soon as you try to analyse a language in terms of syntax, parts of speech etc., "word" emerges as a necessary and obvious unity. The Roman grammarians, and before them the Greek, recognized this. I guess that even primitive, illiterate people and cavemen would have some notion of 'words'. Physical objects are identified by words even if they are slurred together in rapid speech. Edited by tractor on 17 May 2012 at 12:42am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6438 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 26 of 55 18 May 2012 at 6:41am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I read somewhere (a psychology book?) that most people think there are spaces between words in spoken speech, but there are not. If you look at the waveform of an audio file of someone speaking English and ask a person where they think the word boundaries are, they are not where the valleys in the waveform are. They said it's a common misconception. The reason you recognize word boundaries is because you know the language, not because they're audibly apparent. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6438 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 27 of 55 18 May 2012 at 6:42am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Agreed. So why don't Japanese or Thai use spaces between words? Japanese would be at least 572.38% easier to learn to read if there were spaces between words. Little kids books have them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4773 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 28 of 55 18 May 2012 at 9:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Little kids' books also tend not to have kanji or katakana, and the alternation of the three scripts makes spaceless texts somewhat easier to parse. Of course, this in itself is a poor justification for having to learn ~2000 of those bloody things, but that is a whole other topic. As for words and spaces, I think orthographic conventions and traditions play a bigger role in determining where we put spaces in writing than pure grammar. In cultures with a long tradition of writing with spaces the idea of what is a word and what is not is strongly shaped by those orthographic conventions and people no longer notice their arbitrariness. For example, the Kazakh particle "men" is written as a separate word when its meaning is closer to "and", but as a suffix/ending when its meaning is closer to "with". When I first learned it I didn't find it surprising, since I was used to the fact that in Russian "and" and "with" are different words, with the latter requiring a change in the word's ending. But years later, when I was studying Japanese I learned of the particle "to" which can also mean both "and" and "with", but since Japanese doesn't have spaces between words there was no difference in notation and the two meanings were essentially the same particle. After that the Kazakh differentiation struck me as arbitrary, possibly introduced by Russian-speaking philologists designing the Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet and calqueing concepts from Russian (but then again, I haven't seen any Kazakh texts written in the Arabic script before the Revolution, so this may have started earlier). I think I remember reading somewhere about Sapir's work in designing orthographies for some Na-Dene languages. As soon as he taught the previously illiterate native speakers the letters representing their phonemes they would start writing down their sentences, knowing "instinctively" where to put the spaces between the words, and even going as far as arguing with him when he suggested making the words smaller. Since the Na-Dene languages are polysynthetic, a lot of the words that they wrote looked more like sentences from an Indo-European point of view. There's an interesting discussion here about why a Chukchi polysynthetic word like Təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən ('I have a fierce headache') is a word, rather than a sentence with no spaces between words. Edited by vonPeterhof on 18 May 2012 at 9:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6438 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 29 of 55 18 May 2012 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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SoareyousayingtheonlyreasonwethinkEnglishiseasiertoreadwiths pacesisbecauseweareusedtothem? Similarlycouldwejustaseasilygetusedtoreadingitlikethis?
edit - ignore the space between the "s" and "p" in that first sentence. There's a forum limit to how many characters can occur together and I seem to have hit that limit. Edited by IronFist on 18 May 2012 at 6:43pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4700 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 30 of 55 18 May 2012 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's probably correct, but it doesn't necessarily correspond to spelling. For example Czech children have to learn where to make spaces in writing, because it doesn't come naturally to them, they write fewer spaces than the orthography requires.
Latin was spelled phonemically, so you could just sound out every letter, but you could probably get used to reading English without spaces as well. Edited by LaughingChimp on 18 May 2012 at 7:29pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4689 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 31 of 55 18 May 2012 at 7:19pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yes. And it would make it significantly harder to learn as a foreign language, at the least, without any apparent advantage to be had in the information age. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4700 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 32 of 55 18 May 2012 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I think that French could be much easier to learn without the extra spaces and letters. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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