Saim wrote:Sorry for hijacking this thread with the philosophy of linguistics, I didn't think my throw-away comment about how English and German are closer to each other than you might think would provoke this much discussion.zenmonkey wrote:Hashimi wrote:zenmonkey wrote: the conventional definition of what a word is.
a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and shown with a space on either side when written or printed.
Writing or printing are irrelevant here.
Says you. And yet, here we are writing and not speaking.
Not just hashimi. Generally linguists do not consider writing to be an inherent part of language. Grammar is posterior to writing so I'm not sure how grammatical categories can be defined according to orthographic criteria, unless we're specifically talking about the grammar of the written language as a distinct code.
Who made these definitions?
Do you see the "when"? It's a causal statement.
It doesn't mean that the language is written by obligation.
Yes, I'm quite aware that languages exist without writing (I mean, c'mon, I'm not 8).
But we are talking about long written words for Anki. We can posit that we are talking about languages that are also sometimes written.
(If you do sound in Anki, the length of the words really doesn't matter...)
And, as far as I know, both English and German have a long history of being written.
As to the definitions? The first comes from the an English language dictionary... kind of the reference in definitions (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/word). The others? Ask any German on the street if "Handschuh" is a word or two. See what they say.