ศาลาชุมนุม

[DonSena]

David,

Thank you for that post. Where I think a difficulty arises is when a relative beginner, such as myself, starts reading Thai text. If you come across คนแปลกหน้า in the middle of a sentence, you don't know whether to treat it as 3 "words" or just one, because of your limited knowledge. In that case Is it a word becomes relevant. The question should really be, as you have said Do these separate units have a combined meaning that goes beyond the individual parts. (or something like that) However, that is a function of the reader/learner's stage of learning. As you say we have many similar examples in English "notwithstanding" for example - how on earth do you get its meaning by looking at the parts!

Having said that, it can, for someone who loves language and enjoys playing with words (without any technical linguistic knowledge) be interesting pulling them apart and puzzling over how they came to have that meaning. Sort of amateur etymology or more like the child who gets a new toy, then pulls it to pieces to see how it works.

The question of whether a certain meaningful unit is a word -- more precise term: "lexeme" -- is not answered arbitrarily. Linguists have long considered the concept of word and made it part of the fundamentals of the study.

If we are given a Thai sentence containing คนแปลกหน้า , we can see that it's possible to insert one or more additional words into the sentence to expand its meaning, perhaps to say where the stranger is going.

None of the newly-inserted words, however, can interpose between the meaningful parts of คนแปลกหน้า -- say, between คน and แปลก or between แปลก and หน้า .

It is one of the standardized definitions of a word that its meaningful parts are inseparable when and if new meaningful elements are inserted into a sentence in which it is used.

Yet another test of word status exists: When and if a word is transposed within a sentence, all of its meaningful parts must be transposed; no one part of a word can remain in its original location. For instance,

"The foreman supervises the workmen." and "The workmen are supervised by the foreman." (Active voice is replaced by passive voice.)

Also ...

"I can tolerate honeybees, but I abhor yellow jackets." and "Honeybees I can tolerate, but yellow jackets I abhor." (Word-order inversion transposes direct objects to head of sentence.)

Notice that the identification of a word in a sentence is not arbitrary.

[keith]

You are, of course, perfectly correct. I remember reading somewhere recently a list of the 10 or 20 biggest unanswered questions in linguistics and defining "word" was well up there. But this still doesnt make it any easier for the learner! An accomplished and experienced speaker of Thai, let alone a native speaker, this is a non-issue as they will recognise this as a single word. A learner though may not know it and may not have the skills and knowledge to apply the test that you put forward. But that's what learning the language is all about.

Oh! So much to learn - so little time!

[gpstracking]