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> we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! What's your best attempt? :-)
\s\w+\s ;)
cljs.user> (re-seq #"\s\w+\s" "やり直して")
nil
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Creole is both a sociohistoric and linguistic term. The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! As for whether English is a Creole, it’s important to understand the motivation for Creolistics at its origin. It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages that bef…
Why don't just define a new word? I mean you're linguists! :D Pseudo-Creole, a language that's technically a Creole, but doesn't fit the sociohistoic context. I think, it would be funny if a word for giving specific languages legitimacy is used to define a language that had more legitimacy to begin with.
I expect that a creole language will evolve over centuries into something that is less and less considered as a creole when compared with more recent creole languages.
I think it's more useful to consider "creolization events" in the history of a language rather than a blanket "creole/non-creole" attribute
Is English just badly pronounced French [video]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393
If so it is equally badly spelled German.
Is English just badly pronounced French [video]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393
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It's a bit like the old saying, "All models are wrong, some models are useful." The concept of a "word" is useful in everyday language, particularly in English -- it's host language, unsurprisingly enough -- and (probably) other Indo-European languages. However, in a more precise context, it breaks down because of edge cases. For example, "words" in agglutinative languages[1] (e.g., Turkish) act very differently from…
In Chinese, it's very difficult to define word boundaries. Each character is a syllable, with a particular pronunciation and a constellation of meanings, usually closely related to one another. There are very common combinations of characters that appear together, which one could define as words. However, often, you could just as easily view the individual characters as words, or the combination as a word. In some ca…
Also, the problems you raise here are mostly just as applicable to English, though perhaps for somewhat fewer words. Is a "walkie-talkie" one word, or two? How about "unmarried"? The un- prefix has a distinct meaning on its own, even if it never appears alone, after all. Or how about "can't"? Technically it's a contraction of "can not", and those words do sometimes appear separately as well, even in this same meaning.