Talk:Word

message: Would French really classify as a polysyntethic language, I find it hard to see how "je ne le sais pas." would classify as more polysynthetic than "Ah dunno." 惑乱 分からん 07:18, 27 November 2006 (UTC
It merely says that it demonstrates elements of a polysynthetic language, not that it is an example. --124.170.35.1 09:16, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Polysyntethism

message: What about the (apparently) popular process of saying "Word!" after a sentence, as an exclamitory enhancer(?)? Alx xlA 05:12, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pop Culture 

message: "Especially confusing are languages such as Vietnamese, where spaces do not necessarily indicate breaks in words and boundaries must be determined by the context of the piece."
Do literate Vietnamese find it difficult to distinguish a word, or is this a difficulty held by language learners acquiring Vietnamese literacy? If it is the latter, then I doubt Vietnamese should be called "especially confusing."  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.180.55.14 (talk) 19:49, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Confusing to Westerners, of course.  It's natural for Vietnamese to delimit monosyllabic morphemes.  I have modified the article.  - TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 06:05, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusing to whom? 

message: "All in all, a word is a very powerful concept that permits us to communicate with others and interact with the rest of the world."
Is this really a necessary sentence? It's so wishy washy: "All in all ..." also it's not so much "a word" that allows us to "communicate with others AND interact with the rest of the world" (aren't communicating and interacting the same thing in this context as well?), but language itself, of which "a word" is only a part. And what the hell is a "powerful concept"?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.179.95.145 (talk) 02:35, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Powerful Concept? 

message: Just to let you know, I added a space into the two separate words above and mentioned; 'abovementioned'.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.142.10.142 (talk) 01:28, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Greetings 

message: Does the definition of portmanteau really need to be in the first paragraph of this page?  I see its relevance here, but I've been feeling like "partmanteau" is a buzzword here on wikipedia just used for the sake of using it, and many times inappropriately.  I'd like to see it moved to the body somewhere. 129.21.191.202 (talk) 22:30, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree it seems somewhat out of place. It could either be moved, or it could be placed into context by adding similar terms like "clipped form", "acronym", and "initialism". —Angr 07:36, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I have removed the sentence from the lead section. Cnilep (talk) 20:02, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Portmanteau 

message: The beginning of the article is very odd; it waxes philosophical and says some basically untrue things: "Words are fundamental units of inherent quality or basic constitution of things." The word "the" doesn't have much inherent quality; or if it does, then only about as much as prefixes like "con-" and "post-", which aren't words. Anyway the next sentence claims words represent mental pictures, which isn't true. What picture does "any" represent?
This is followed by quotes which were obviously pasted from somewhere. I don't know how much of this text was just pasted from something else; googling doesn't find it, so maybe not...
Then there is the claim that all human expression and communication is representing words. Words can try and explain what smiles or flags mean, but that certainly doesn't mean those symbols are just expressing words.
Anyway. Rant aside, I'm fixing the thing to my own taste. However, I admit that my point of view is rather overly scientific (throwing out poetic stuff because it's technically wrong?), and furthermore I actually question whether there is any good definition of word. And so someone might want to revert or partially revert my changes.
Obviously the philosophy section I created needs a little work.
Dranorter (talk) 03:12, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The last thing the article needs is an "in popular culture" section. We'll get a list of every episode of every TV show where anyone has ever uttered the word "word". +Angr 06:42, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  introduction 

message: Word (language) needs merging here, it is a copy of the Citizendium article on the topic and the two are redundant. Fences&Windows 15:51, 30 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: To clarify: I am not suggesting a full-content merger, only a selective merger. I'm not a fan of full-content dumps anyway, and upon closer examination I find only one element at Word (language) that is both sourced and not already discussed at Word. That is the discussion of semantic primes. While I think it might be worthwhile to have some link to Semantic primes at Word, I would not object to a redirect without merging. Cnilep (talk) 20:42, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

text: A selective merge or a redirect without a merge would both be fine by me. Btw, this article was copied in as part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Citizendium Porting. Fences&Windows 15:56, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge

message: I was searching for the origin of the quotation "the meaning of a word is its use in the language.". I was a bit disapointed, 'cause I just found a link to secondary sources. Which is of cause helpful to come deeper into the topic, but which won't give me the possibility to study the original context of the /famous/ quotation. 
Does anyone know the book and the page on which it was printed? I think it was the "blue book". 
Thanks a lot! Otherwise: a great article.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.74.147.134 (talk) 09:14, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quotations 

message: Shouldn't this article include a link to the Wiktionary definition? 
Dlabtot (talk) 23:42, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, go for it. That template is seriously underused on Wikipedia. —Angr (talk) 05:56, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wiktionary 

message: This text is absolutely missing intext citations. This text could be easily cited using various educational websites. Ratibgreat (talk) 18:28, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: You are welcome to add some. rʨanaɢ (talk) 05:12, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intext cites 

message: I suggest the line "Orthographic boundaries: See below." is superfluous when the article discusses the orthographic boundaries separately. Speling12345 (talk) 8:43, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suggestion 

message: How dare you (or you) to "create" a global encyclopedia and write such blood-curdling and fist-clenching bull*s:
 "Hebrew hrmm ("breath", "spirit", also translated as "word" or "angel"), probably pronounced, memrah. The English words memory, membership, message, and meaning are derived from this word."
It just... defies any description, you, German-Linguistic-Expert. I pitty you.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.230.226.234 (talk) 10:54, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ridiculous 

message: Another REALLY bad Wikipedia article, imho. If it is about the linguistic term, instead of starting off the lede with "In linguistics ..." why not start with "Applied to language ..." (or eqivalent)? SHOULD the general reader be expected to know what "linguistics" is? I also demand an authoratative reference to the statement:"In linguistics a word is the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning)." I have so many problems with this. In no particular order: it conflates the "as utterance" meaning with the "linguistic meaning", the distinction it makes is not useful in that its "meaning" in isolation may not be its meaning in context, "element" is not defined and its use here is tautological (if words aren't identified, 'elements' won't be, either). I see absolutely NO reason to include both the difficult phrase "with semantic or pragmatic content" and the more intuitive phrase "with literal or practical meaning". I also fail to understand what "practical meaning" (or "pragmatic content") MEANS. I doubt if you can produce an authoratative DEFINITION of either of those terms. Moving on... The first examples are lousy. They are all single syllable English words!! Why not include "a"? (perhaps because as an article it fails to have a meaning uttered in isolation? (What does "a" mean?)) Why not include "abnormalities"? why not include "aminoazomethyphenylalanine"? And how is that definition useful to determine whether or not "km" is a word or an abbreviation (is an abbreviation a word?, Is "1" a word? Is the utterance "letmebe" a word? one or three?) And (perhaps I'm just ignornat here) doesn't the use of "morpheme" to describe single syllable words confuse rather than inform? Why focus on the difference between morphemes and words when there are several equally valid ways to categorize the term "word"? And how can anyone justify the use of the weasle phrases "not necessarily", "may not be able", and "will typically" (the word "may" is used 4 times in the lede, does it mean "might" or "shall"?) The lede's last paragraph is the clearest and most useful, imho. (Although it could use improvement, too.) By jumping immediately into the "linguistic" use, the editors SHOULD understand that they have gone to an ABSTRACTION, not a "pragmatic" definition (as it true with most if not all technical definitions). Oh, not only are abbreviations ignored here but so too are nonsense words WITHOUT semantic content, is "mlaxup", which I just invented, a word? Seems to me the fundamental meaning of "word" is either  an element of an utterance (in some languages) OR a linguistic element. I doubt if either can be claimed to be a "fundamental" (or "indivisible") element in any absolute sense (in most languages both are composed of smaller elements in audible and visual presentation.) (which brings up sign language and braille...). So, could someone who knows what they're talking about rewrite the lede to make it sensible to a general reader and so that it corresponds to the actual definition(s) of "word"? Thanks. (Also, do a better job in the examples of words, clauses, phrases and sentences. A phrase shouldn't also be a clause, a clause shouldn't also be a sentence; the goal here is to distinguish them! )216.96.76.79 (talk) 19:01, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: The critical thinking is good and I am sure that the article can benefit from it to some degree, but some of the "everyone else must be an idiot" flavor is misplaced. There are some flawed assumptions here about how simple and mutually exclusive everything must/should be, an assumption of an intrinsic black/white behind a mere poorly written explanation. Many things in the sciences resist dirt-simple mutually exclusive definitions—even exclusive definitions that we can manage to distill to one line are more often than not subtly clever for having pulled it off. For example, "not necessarily" and "may not be able" are simply correct: some morphemes can also be words (for example, the indefinite articles "a", "an"), but many are not (for example, -y, -ness). This is already explained with examples right there where it's stated. Regarding the last point, all clauses are also phrases, many clauses are also sentences, and many sentences are also clauses. Sometimes natural language doesn't offer mutual exclusiveness. It's not a pedagogical flaw obscuring a simplistic reality—it's the underlying multivariate reality that makes good pedagogy challenging. Quercus solaris (talk) 01:47, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition and Lede 

message: Substituted at 10:52, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

message: The word "desinence" is defined in the Wictionary as a technical term from linguistics. The word "suffix" is the standard word used in United States of America in teaching school children. The Wikipedia page "Desinence" is in fact a redirect page to the Wikipedia article "Suffix". Suffix is 150 times more common in use than desinence, according to the books.google.com/ngrams word count of words in over 1,000,000 books. The Wikipedia style page instructs editors to avoid technical language in favor of standard English words. So I made this change. Nick Beeson (talk) 19:09, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  suffix 

message: The section on word boundaries doesn't really explain why in Chinese, the words are considered to be isolated instances, while in say, Japanese, the words are considered to be a hodgepodge of morphemes combined into one unit. Chinese does have grammatical particles that have no meaning on their own, just like Korean has suffixes that have no meaning on their own. Now, there are some features that can distinguish a few (though not not close to all) breaks in Japanese words (which I believe are primarily due to /n/ at the end of a word becoming [ɴ]), but assuming one picks an agglutinative language that lacks such things, or at least have so few of them such methods aren't usable (of which I am sure there are plenty), what differentiates it from analytic Chinese (which I have seen written in what appears to be agglutinative fashion akin to Korean and Japanese, such as the Chinese poetry here)?
What about English, which has lost a lot of its inflections to become predominantly analytic? Why is "will have done" said to be three words, even though "will" and "have" both lack meaning on their own? Is it solely orthography in such a case? The sandhi in English isn't constrained by word (but rather either by morpheme or not at all with neither being consistent, such as in "disable" /dis.eɪ.bɫ̩/ and "whatcha" /ʍʌ.t͡ʃə/), so that can't be used unless you want to make almost every morpheme a separate word. And people can say "un" on its own in correcting someone (albeit rarely), just like they can say "the" on its own to correct someone (which is not quite as rare, but still far from common, as one usually will add the word that follows).
I get the feeling (and correct me if I'm wrong) that it's somewhat arbitrary, and in the absence of phonological evidence, linguists will use the orthography or their gut, and it will rarely change thereafter.
Blanket P.I. (talk) 21:56, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Word Boundaries (Analytic vs. Agglutinative) 

message: A word is an idea in the head with a sound label that comes out of the mouth. Other definitions may talk about the difference between a word and a term, or draw from language science and talk about its irreducible form, in pure language (not human speech) but is probably talking about lexemes. -184.250.56.111 (talk) 02:44, 25 October 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: In language, a word is an idea that has a spoken label —a singular or compound sound which can then be used in an expression composed of sequences of words. In writing, the 'label' is a graphical-form glyph, or string of glyphs, which may either emulate the spoken form (cf. alphabet) or else represent the idea through symbolism (cf. ideogram). In language science terms, a word is the smallest element..
_184.250.56.111 (talk) 02:50, 25 October 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Not really. A word is a sequence of sounds, not an idea. Not all words even represent ideas. I'm also a little confused by your use of the terms "compound sound", "language science", and "pure language", and the focus on alphabets and ideograms is a little odd, considering that there are other common kinds of writing systems, and true ideograms are rare in actual writing systems. For all of these reasons, I think the current lead is clearer and more accurate than what you've proposed here. —Granger (talk · contribs) 11:23, 25 October 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Name a word that does not have an idea connected to it. It would be a sound and not a word. It could be written in transcription form, but its either a word or a transcription of a sound. And sounds that don't have a specific assigned meaning will usually have some meaning in the way that they are used, and then would be words, because theres an idea connected to that sound. -184.250.0.250 (talk) 03:29, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: One example is the word "it" in "It's raining", which is there purely to fulfill the requirements of English syntax and does not represent an idea (see Dummy pronoun). Anyway, this discussion isn't going to go anywhere useful without reliable sources. —Granger (talk · contribs) 12:43, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

text:  Nonsense. The it in "it's raining" is meaningful, you're perhaps just making the mistake of assigning meaning to objects only. So there is a case of you being in error. -2600:1:9A03:5FBC:7D74:79C5:D9FB:283 (talk) 03:47, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is a word 

message: 118.172.62.228 (talk) 00:48, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. NiciVampireHeart 00:45, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 17 February 2019 

message: The article should mention the existence of linguistic expression that are seemingly made up of multiple words, yet exhibit word-like behavior (blind spot, catch fire, work in progress, etc). I'm not good writing up a new section, so I'm hoping that others can discuss/expand on this concept in the article. 
Two properties that linguists agree words should have is cohesiveness and fixed internal order. There are there empirical tests to discover degrees of wordhood: the seperation test (credit card -> *a blind and tiny spot), the substitution test (to take place -> *to take location) and changing the order of the constituents (They turned up. -> *Up they turned). The article should also mention that some multi-word expressions might pass some but not all of these tests, which opens up a scalar view of wordhood (some words being more "wordlike" than others). Source: The Lexicon by Elisabetta Ježek, p.25-28.--Megaman en m (talk) 15:35, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Multi-word expressions 

message: None of these words can be used by white people. Thyne mother (talk) 20:40, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Nardog (talk) 21:06, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 15 September 2023 

message: Mga salitang pareho ang baybay mag ka iba ang kahulugan 2405:8D40:48D9:2E17:178D:5019:166B:3BED (talk) 08:53, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Filipino 

message: បង ប្អូន ល្អ 117.20.115.222 (talk) 00:16, 20 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  racedook 

message: បង ប្អូន ល្អ 117.20.115.222 (talk) 00:18, 20 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: 015935199 117.20.115.222 (talk) 00:19, 20 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  tacedook 

message: បង ប្អូន ល្អ 117.20.115.222 (talk) 00:19, 20 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:   015935199