can you help with this confusing concept about "words"?

Question

my friends were thinking the other day.. is a word really a word unless it is spoken? if it is typed or written, is it no longer a word? is it like a picture of a word, a representation? or is it still considered a word? i'm confused! :)

Answer 1

Linguists study almost exclusively spoken language, because it's the main concept: obviously all languages were spoken before they were written down. Writing is a way of representing speech so that other people know what you said. It's only approximate, because it leaves out gestures, tone of voice, etc.

So a written word is a representation of the word, and you can talk about it as if it was the spoken word because the nuances (gestures etc.) are not as important as the basic meaning conveyed by the writing.

One effect of all this is that writing systems evolve much more slowly than spoken language. So a word like "night" is spelled with "gh" that is no longer pronounced, while in German, the word is "Nacht" and the "ch" is pronounced.

As another example, Chinese would be completely different now if they hadn't started writing it down so early.

Answer 2

Hello,

You are probably wrestling with some very old related questions, like the relationship between the word and the thing it is supposed to name, the relationship between having a language and being able to think, and a couple of other classic stinkers that just won't go away after you've washed down that fifteenth Aspirin with Coke.

Linguists distinguish written representations and approximations of speech from actual spoken usage, because the language faculty is at work in your brain, not on a page or a screen. That includes your interpretation of the page or the screen, since you must re-create in your brain from the glop you read an instance of genuine conversational language use. Spontaneous, natural linguistic activity is always in the brain first, and that's about all we study. Peripheral weirdness is nevertheless always interesting, and It is a fact that textual phenomena can seem to take on lives of their own that could never even be expressed in conversation. Think of the odd-ball tricks that turn up in blogs -those can only be keyboards talking, right?

But I don't know about words ceasing to be words once they have been written down. What do they turn into? Records of past exchanges betwen people, or of someone expressing himself? Maybe, if you think of a word as meaning something special and a little different every time it is used.

Turn all this around, as an experiment. Notice that very few words that matter and last are born on the page or the screen. Let me ask you: when you learn a word that you have read, was it really already a word, or does it only become one when you learn and speak it? What was it, before it was graced with your approval and privileged by your use of it?

Answer 3

(1) : a speech sound or series of speech sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning usually without being divisible into smaller units capable of independent use

(2) : the entire set of linguistic forms produced by combining a single base with various inflectional elements without change in the part of speech elements

(3) : a written or printed character or combination of characters representing a spoken word -- sometimes used with the first letter of a real or pretended taboo word prefixed as an often humorous euphemism.

(4) : any segment of written or printed discourse ordinarily appearing between spaces or between a space and a punctuation mark

(5) : a number of bytes processed as a unit and conveying a quantum of information in communication and computer work

So it's still a word--printed, spoken, or otherwise!

Answer 4

It's still a word. A word is the expression of a single thought; it doesn't matter what form the thought is presented in.

Answer 5

It is a word whether it is typed, written or spoken.

Kira: "What's writing?"
Jen: "Words that stay. My master told me."
- The Dark Crystal