IIRC there’s also a mis-match between how many sounds a human can produce per minute/second whatever and how many sounds they can perceive.
I can’t correct you because I don’t know, but it is an interesting conjecture and one I hadn’t heard before.
“A whole nother thing” is an example of faulty tmesis (from the Greek word for cutting). The speaker is dimly aware that the word another is really two words stuck together: a+other, with -n- inserted as a vowel separator. If they were stuck together, they can be separated again. But now the -n-, preceded by the consonant sound at the end of whole doesn’t need to be there any more.
My sneaking suspicion is that you’re giving whoever came up with that ridiculous story a bit too much credit - frankly, I doubt it was based on anything factual, since the number of potential words that could be built from a single word in any of the Eskimo languages is a lot higher than 40 or 200 or any of the figures you commonly hear. I think someone just made it up because they thought it sounded good.
One of the cues we use for determing where one word ends and another begins in connected speech is the rule one’s language has for what sounds are permitted at the beginning and end of syllables and words. For some of us linguists, that issue alone is a fascinating topic of study.
If you’re interested, you can go to www.praat.org to download the free Praat program for speech analysis. My favorite part is the spectogram portion (I like to reverse the speech).
Absolutely Monty. My point was that any given language provides a constant stream of information to the native speaker enabling her to make these kinds of distinctions.
According to my psych. notes, people speak up to around 12 phonemes per second, but we can understand up to 50 per second.
Oops, forgot to finish and submit the post I started last night . . .
I’m not sure what this even means. Does she suggest that Proto-World was polysynthetic (i.e. consisting of words with tons of suffixes and prefixes, as discussed above with regard to the Eskimo languages)? If so, that may be true but it’s not something we could ever hope to find any meaningful support for; whatever the original human language was like, it’s so far gone that we don’t have much hope of recovering it.
On the other hand, I sort of take this as meaning that “words” are some sort of arbitrary modern convention. This makes no sense; the expressive power of language exists precisely because small parts are used to create larger ones. Any long phrase, to be meaningful, would have to be assembled from meaningful parts. It’s the way that we assemble sentences from words that allows us to have a theoretically infinite number of sentences. If sentences weren’t assembled from simpler components, every sentence meaning would have to be memorized separately and the creative aspect of language wouldn’t exist, making it relatively useless.
I don’t understand this idea at all.
There’s definitely phrases that are arguably compounds that we English speakers write with spaces. The usual test for a compound word (rather than two separate words) is looking for stressed syllables. A compound will have only one syllable with primary stress, though it can have others with secondary stress. Separate words will usually have a syllable with primary stress in each word.
Compare “French teacher”, as in someone who teaches French, and “French teacher”, as in a teacher from France. Normally, when I say it at least, the former only has one primary stress - and thus arguably is a single compound word, “Frenchteacher”. The second, on the other hand, has primary stress in both words - “Frénch téacher”.
Goes to show that writing systems are to a huge extent arbitrary.
Yay for linguistics threads!
I might also point out that in written Japanese, there are no breaks between words using spaces as in most other languages. Certainly they use the concept of separate words, though both the spoken and written language don’t parse them out.
The classis example of this is:
white house (primary stress + primary stress) = a house that is white
white house (primary stress + secondary stress) = the place where the president lives.
It’s Donaudampfschiffsfueherswitwe but if you break it up, it’s not that hard:
Donau dampf schiff fuehers witwe
Danube steam ship captain’s widow
and I think longer words are certainly possible.
As for the OP, it is certainly that way. Although I can read and, to some extent, speak write French, my inability to sort out the words makes it impossible for me to hold a decent conversation. I can usually understand a radio announcer, though, since they speak in a different way.
Incidentally, the difficulty of sorting out words makes speech recognition software very hard to create.
Ehhhh… not exactly. In typical Japanese, the use of syllabaries, Chinese characters, and punctuation provide fairly obvious separation between words. Of course if you’re on primers writting mainly in kana then you’ll be pulling your hair out, because everything does run together when written that way.
Chinese itself, of course, does not have this convenience.
Thai and Khmer are written with no spaces between words. The reading of most Thai letters depends on whether they’re at the end of a word or not, because they change pronunciation when word-final. However, you can’t tell where the ends of words are unless you already know the words. This is one of the big hurdles for beginning students of written Thai.
Bit late on this topic, but… I had a case where I experienced this phenomenon first hand recently. I was in Poland for my friend’s birthday a few months ago; I speak a little bit of Polish (very basic, no more than 50 words) and was trying to use it as much as I could whilst there. By the end of the holiday I was listening to the tannoy announcement in the airport and the long stream of meaningless sounds that was coming out, and was suddenly startled to hear very clearly and distinctly the word (anglicised) psheprashm which means “excuse me/I’m sorry”. After I realised this I started listening to people speaking Polish around me and realised I could hear the individual words I knew and that to my ears they actually sounded like they had a gap before them, even though there was clearly no difference in the speed or the speech between that word and any other.
Again, just goes to show how much our brains “fill in” for us in ways we don’t realise.
Thanks for bumping the thread, illuminatiprimus – I missed it the first time around. Fascinating stuff.
If you want to drive someone crazy, just speak with a pause between each word. The classic TV example is Chandler Bing. Could-it-be-anymore-annoying? Oh–my–God!
I just did that to myself and it even annoyed me! 
This is from The American Heritage Dictionary:
WORD HISTORY: The word nerd and a nerd, undefined but illustrated, first appeared in 1950 in Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo: “And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo a Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!” (The nerd itself is a small humanoid creature looking comically angry, like a thin, cross Chester A. Arthur.) Nerd next appears, with a gloss, in the February 10, 1957, issue of the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Mail in a regular column entitled “ABC for SQUARES”: “Nerd—a square, any explanation needed?” Many of the terms defined in this “ABC” are unmistakable Americanisms, such as hep, ick, and jazzy, as is the gloss “square,” the current meaning of nerd. The third appearance of nerd in print is back in the United States in 1970 in Current Slang: “Nurd [sic], someone with objectionable habits or traits. . . . An uninteresting person, a ‘dud.’” Authorities disagree on whether the two nerds—Dr. Seuss’s small creature and the teenage slang term in the Glasgow Sunday Mail—are the same word. Some experts claim there is no semantic connection and the identity of the words is fortuitous. Others maintain that Dr. Seuss is the true originator of nerd and that the word nerd (“comically unpleasant creature”) was picked up by the five- and six-year-olds of 1950 and passed on to their older siblings, who by 1957, as teenagers, had restricted and specified the meaning to the most comically obnoxious creature of their own class, a “square.”
The whole ‘Eskimo words for snow’ thing is a crock.
David Mendosa has a good page on this (along with a very funny list of his own).
I quote:
The Great Inuit Vocabulary Hoax is anthropology’s contribution to urban legends. It apparently started in 1911 when anthropologist Franz Boaz casually mentioned that the Inuit—he called them “Eskimos,” using the derogatory term of a tribe to the south of them for eaters of raw meat—had four different words for snow. With each succeeding reference in textbooks and the popular press the number grew to sometimes as many as 400 words.
In fact, “Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English,” according to linguist Steven Pinker in his book The Language Instinct. “Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen.”
:endquote
You don’t have to look any further thanUnca Cecil for Eskimo works about snow.