On 6/28/06, R A Brown <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 'Word' itself is not as easy to define as is often thought. I would
> hesitate, tho, to include ideographs (at least in the strict sense of
> the term).

Why? And please make explicit what you mean by the 'strict sense'.

> > The closest I can come is where you muddy the boudary of a symbol, as
> > in the 'fusional' version of my NLF2DWS ideas,
>
> Exactly - I wondered if Mike had in mind conlangs in which the author
> has attempted to convey whole concepts as units by multi-channel
> communication.

That reminds me of another version: if you have a robust ontology
behind it - one that could make any given 'word' at least partially
categorizable, perhaps along several different axes - then you could
a) put different 'parts' of the 'word' in different modes, or possibly
even have them be asynchronous or grammatically indicated in some way;
b) drop parts - what remained would be, maybe, a word (I'd be rather
hard pressed to say), but its meaning would be ambiguous (albeit its
'degredation' of meaning / specificty would be predictable, depending
on the system);
c) chunk the 'word' into parts that are then used as... "words"? in
their own right. This last though would be hard to distinguish from
merely ad*s/nouns/verbs though; perhaps once you hit some level,
reducing it further would create a composition of non-words...

> Interesting. I am told that some mathematicians can look at mathematical
> formulae and do the math(s) without the need for any mental verbalizing.
> I don't know how true that is. Certainly, I would need to process them
> verbally.

I do to a certain extent. I think it is much like how one learns to
"think in" any new system (music, math, Arabic, morse code, whatever);
it takes a while to be able to "natively" process the stuff, rather
than doing what amounts to a quick translation.

>> (But then again, little kids, before they acquire language, do it
all the time: intend and point.)
> They do, don't they? Some people seem to carry the intend-and-point
> habit over in certain situations long after they have acquired language.

One way I've heard of defining a 'word' (or even the core of
'language') is what happens when you change that pointing into a
symbol, so you no longer need the pointee to be at the end of it. :-)

 - Sai