I thought people might be interested in an excerpt from a report in The Age (Melbourne) of a recent Melbourne conference on The Status of Word co-organised by Prof Alexandra Aikhenvald, a Russian language conservation expert, who said that languages such as Eskimo and some South American languages are useful when studying the concept of ‘word’.

"They are interesting because in English you have to say a whole sentence. In Eskimo you just say one word or one sequence of suffixes. Instead of saying ‘I go to the shop four times a day’, you say ‘shop go four I’.

"You put everything together and you pronounce it all in one breath. So what do you do, how many words are there and what are words?

"This is what we need to know, how we decide in order to be able to understand this language properly; what makes them different and still whether we can describe them using the same terms."