yet another one forgets that linguists don't really know what a "word" is
i really don't think it's common knowledge that "word" isn't a technical linguistic term.
I’m (a linguist) inclined to say that a word is a unit of meaning made up of phonemes, but that’s not a sufficient definition because I can put phonemes together into something that isn’t a word and also there are units of meaning that are single phonemes and definitely not words (like affixes)
So maybe a word is a unit of meaning that denotes a specific thing or idea but love and Santa Claus disprove that
Or maybe a word is just an arbitrarily assigned label for something between a phoneme and a sentence
It’s all very wibbly and ironically undefinable and it amazes me to this day that not only are we able to communicate with each other despite not knowing what a word is, but I’ve also written hundreds of pages of academic theory and discussion using words to talk about words and we still don’t know what they actually are
this is the beautiful paradox of our field. someone asks us "what's language?" and we say, "what are you, a cop?"
What are words? We just don't know.
i once used that PRECISE image to open a lecture and not one of my students laughed. thank you for belatedly validating my pedagogical choices.
A word is a collection of phonemes that have an assigned meaning agreed upon by a significant portion of a relevant group, and which can provide that meaning without needing to be attached to any other phonemes.
I might be missing something there, but I think I got it all.
