A word is a unit of As with any complex, emergent concept, language is somewhat resistant to definition. ...language that carries meaning and consists of one or more In Linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a given language. ...morphemes. Words can be combined to create A phrase is a group of words that functions as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence. ...phrases, A clause is a group of words consisting of a subject (often just a single noun) and a predicate (sometimes just a single verb). ...clauses and In linguistics, the sentence is a unit of language, characterised in most languages by the presence of a finite verb. ...sentences. A word consisting of more than one morpheme is called a A compound is a word (lexeme) that consists of more than one free morpheme. ...compound.

Latin - Wikipedia /**/ @import /skins/monobook/IE50Fixes. ...Latin written without any word breaks in the Codex Claromontanus

The precise definition of what a word is depends on languages, which is not always clear. In most A writing system, also called a script, is used to visually record a language with symbols. ...writing systems, a word is usually marked out in the text by Interword separation is the set of symbol or spacing conventions used by the orthography of a script to separate words. ...interword separation such as A space is a punctuation convention for providing interword separation in some scripts, including the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic. ...spaces or word dividers used in some languages such as Amharic (አማርኛ) is a Semitic language spoken in Northern Central Ethiopia, where it is the official language. ...Amharic. In other languages such as Chinese (written) language (pinyin: zhōngw n) written in Chinese characters The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, 华语/華語, or 中文; Pinyin: H nyǔ, Hu yǔ, or Zhōngw n) is a member of the Sino_Tibetan family of languages. ...Chinese and The Japanese language is a spoken and written language used mainly in Japan. ...Japanese, and in many ancient languages such as The Sanskrit language ( संस्कृता वाक्) is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo_European language family and is not only a classical language, but also an official language of India. ...Sanskrit, word boundaries are not shown.

Even in writing systems that use interword separation, word boundaries are not always clear; for example, even though ice cream is written like two words, it is a single compound because it cannot be separated by another morpheme or rephrased like iced cream or cream of ice. Likewise, a proper noun is a word, however long it is. A space may not be even the main morpheme boundary in a word; the word New Yorker is a compound of New York and _er, not of New and Yorker. In The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...English, many common words have historically progressed from being written as two separate words (e.g. to day) to hyphenated (to_day) to a single word (today), a process which is still ongoing, such as the common spelling of all right as alright.

In A Synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme_to_word ratio. ...synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example, love) may have a number of different forms (for example, loves, loving, and loved). However, these are not usually considered to be different words, but different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes (such as love and -s).

In Polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i. ...polysynthetic languages, the number of morphemes per word can become so large that the word performs the same grammatical role as a phrase or clause in less synthetic languages (for example, in The Yupik people speak five distinct languages, depending on their location. ...Yupik, angyaghllangyugtuq means "he wants to acquire a big boat"). These large_construction words are still single words, because they contain only one content word; the other morphemes are grammatical Bound morphemes can only occur when attached to root morphemes. ...bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone.

Matters seem easier for An analytic language (or isolating language) is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and considered to be full_fledged words. By contrast, in a synthetic language, a word is composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote its syntactic meanings. ...analytic languages. For these languages, a word usually consists of a morpheme, which is often single_syllable. However, it is common even in those languages to combine morphemes into a compound.

In Spoken language is a language that people utter words of the language. ...spoken language, the distinction of individual words is even more complex: short words are often run together, and long words are often broken up. Spoken French (français, langue française) is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered in speakers only by Spanish and Portuguese. ...French has some of the features of a Polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i. ...polysynthetic language: je ne le sais pas ("I do not know it") tends towards / ʒənələsepa/. As the majority of the world's languages are not written, the scientific determination of word boundaries becomes important.

There are five ways to determine where the word boundaries of spoken language should be placed:

Potential pause

A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly, allowing for pauses. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries. However, this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words.

Indivisibility

A speaker is told to say a Sentence, derived from Latin sententia (perception, in the subjective sense of how one feels reality is), has three common meanings: Sentence (linguistics) Sentence (mathematical logic) Open sentence (a term that mathematics teachers attempted to introduce, but not used by mathematicians) Sentence (law) Sentence (music) This is a disambiguation page — a...sentence out loud, and then is told to say the sentence again with extra words added to it. Thus, I have lived in this village for ten years might become I and my family have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the word boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have Infix has meanings in linguistics, mathematics and computer science, and chemistry. ...infixes, which are put inside a word, such as absobloominlutely. Similarly, some have separable affixes; in the German (called Deutsch in German; in German the term germanisch is equivalent to English Germanic), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and is one of the worlds major languages. ...German sentence "Ich komme gut zu Hause an," the verb ankommen is separated.

Minimal free forms

This concept was proposed by Leonard Bloomfield (1887 _ 1949) was an American linguist. ...Leonard Bloomfield. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves. This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes (units of meaning). However, some written words are not minimal free forms, as they make no sense by themselves (for example, the and of).

Phonetic boundaries

Some languages have particular rules of Pronunciation refers to: the way a word or a language is usually spoken; the manner in which someone utters a word. ...pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be. For example, in a language that regularly In linguistics, stress is the emphasis given to some syllables (often no more than one in each word, but in many languages, long words have a secondary stress a few syllables away from the primary stress, as in the words cóunterfòil or còunterintélligence. ...stresses the last syllable of a word (like The Modern Hebrew language is a Semitic language of the Afro_Asiatic language family. ...Hebrew), a word boundary is likely to fall after each stressed syllable. Another example can be seen in a language that has This article is in need of attention. ...vowel harmony (like Turkish (Türkçe or Türk dili) is a Turkic language, spoken natively by over 100 million speakers in Turkey, Cyprus, and worldwide. ...Turkish): the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. However, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occassional exception.

Semantic units

Much like the abovementioned minimal free forms, this method breaks down a sentence into its smallest In general, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ...semantic units. However, language often contains words that have little semantic value (and often play a more grammatical role), or semantic units that are compound words.

In practice, linguists apply a mixture of all these methods to determine the word boundaries of any given sentence. Even with the careful application of these methods, the exact definition of a word is often still elusive.

External links

• What Is a Word? (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/documents/essay-_-what-is-a-word.pdf) (PDF)