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tsuwm has suggested that my question about the qualifications necessary to grace a collection of phonemes with the honor of being a word deserved its own thread. I agree.
Dub-dub' suggests, for starters, that "eoxlibnsdaienvlab" is not a word. We can certainly agree that it contains consonant clusters that are not found in any other English word. And, for purposes of discussion, we may as well limit ourselves to English words, so it seems like a reasonable thing to say that "eoxlibnsdaienvlab" is not a word. "Inciteful" on the other hand, is not only made up of quite pronounceable consonant clusters, but it is composed of nothing but perfectly legal morphemes. Note that I am not trying to claim word status for "inciteful", just wondering what it takes to be a word. And noting that "inciteful" is a common misspelling of "insightful" does not mean that it couldn't means something else.
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Inciteful could be a very useful word if one were commenting upon insightful citations. It would depend upon context, but if the point were clear, then this created word would be understood from context. I'd say 'inciteful' would be a very good and useful word if its meaning in context were clear.
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veteran
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veteran
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Tightly defined, a word is a symbol that transfers information about the Universe
from one entity to an other. What? Have you heard something that I don't know?
ED: Sorry. How's that ?
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Ya wanna stick a carriage return in there somewhere, Milo? Right after the "Universe" would be a good place.
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Tightly defined, a word is a symbol that transfers information about the Universe from one entity to an other.
% = Isn't a word, but it is a symbol that fits the above *constraints.
What do we have, so far, to agree on that a "word" is? Is there any thing we can agree on other than what *it isn't? If so, what is that which we can agree *it isn't?
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journeyman
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Allow me to rephrase what I meant by a "non-word", as I doubted it would spark up any sort of controversy.
A word, in my book, is any continuous series of letters confined by punctuation or spaces. A real word is one that is found in dictionaries. I'd say that yes, "eoxlibnsdaienvlab" is, by the most strict definition, a word. But it's not a real word. It's never been used in conversation, unless one of you has (somehow) muttered it today or yesterday, it's probably never existed in a sentence until WW did the honor, and no dictionary would even think about accepting it, even under the definition of "a ridiculous series of letters". I guess it just depends on your personal definition of the word "word".
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% = Isn't a word, but it is a symbol that fits the above *constraints.
______________________________________________________
Now Musick, stop before you declare truth a democracy,
because Truth doesn't give a whit what we agree upon here.
Agreeing is not the same thing as being right.
But if you don't want % to be a word then so be it.
You can define the term "word" anyway that suits your fancy.
But the establishment of parameters of definitions
that include all referents and exclude all non-referents
of a particular word, including the word "word",
is a necessary precondition to effecting a more-or-less
precise transfer of meaning.
Agreed?
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"eoxlibnsdaienvlab" is, by the most strict definition, a word.
Still looking for the definition. I would think that pronounceability and a generally agreed meaning, at least by some subset of the population, would be minimum requirements. "Eoxlibnsdaienvlab" fails on both those crtiteria. %, on the other hand, would seem to me to pass.
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I agree with Faldage's analysis of 'eoxlibnsdaienvlab.' Eoxlibnsdaienvlab is a random clustering of letters that may appear to be word-like, possibly even a word from another language, but unlikely so unless I was a very lucky monkey at the keyboard.
Symbols can represent meaningful utterances we readily understand, and it could be argued that letters, too, are symbols representing meaningful utterances. However, I think that symbols are representations of words and not actually words themselves. I would restrict words to being:
meaningful utterances
alphabetical representations of those meaningful utterances
...but only when examining the written language in a search for words. I can write the code: 3-1-19-20 to represent the word cast, but I would not argue that
3-1-19-20 is a word. I would say 3-1-19-20 is a symbolic representation of the word cast.
The entire situation dramatically changes when we examine other languages, such as sign languages that we've discussed here before.
So, in my own consideration of words and language without including sign languages, I would not include symbols, such as %, to be called and recognized as words in and of themselves, but representations of words, such as the word percent. I'm fairly sure that I'll be in the minority here. But so it goes...
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Faldage:
ee'-ox-lib-bins-DAY-en-vlab. And from WW's sentence, I deduce it to be an adverb meaning "wistfully". Okay, a subset of the population, albeit a small one, has come up with a pronunciation, and then a meaning. Is it now a word?
I'd say that, although the word it represents is not, "%" is completely unpronounceable. Wouldn't you?
Take my nickname, for example. The only reason it exists is because one day, someone spelled "animal" terribly wrong. AniamL has no agreed pronunciation, although I pronounce it "ahn-ee-AHM-ull". It has no distinct meaning, although the people with whom I have corresponded for the last year or so use it interchangeably with "animal". I don't even think I've seen it spelled correctly more than once or twice on this forum (Dr. Bill may have been the only one), so it might not even have a determined spelling. Is AniamL a word?
Once again, I think it's all based on your own definition of the word "word".
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