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I should note that typically discussions of language are more fruitful around spoken (or signed) languages rather than writing. Writing is an artificial formal

I should note that typically discussions of language are more fruitful around spoken (or signed) languages rather than writing. Writing is an artificial formal system, and as such sometimes has aspects which are much more socilogiclaly determined than spoken language, which tends to evolve more freely. 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.

DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
The issues I raise are somewhat applicable to English, but to a far lesser extent. In Chinese, just about every syllable has its own set of meanings. In English, there are compound words, and some words have prefixes or suffixes, but you can't just arbitrarily break a word into its syllables and assign a meaning to every syllable. Imagine if the word "syllable" could be broken down as syl-la-ble, and every person who spoke English could tell you what "syl," "la" and "ble" individually meant. That's the situation in Chinese, for almost every polysyllabic word you can utter. They can almost all be decomposed into syllables that have individual meanings. It's a very different paradigm from English.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Yes, I understand there is a huge difference of the degree to which this applies to the language. I was just pointing out that none of these things should be alien to an English speaker, and even a linguist who only knew English would have had similar struggles to define "word" because of these problems (though of course they could have decided to file them under "exceptions", which doesn't work for Chinese).

DiogenesKynikos 2y ago

The issues I raise are somewhat applicable to English, but to a far lesser extent. In Chinese, just about every syllable has its own set of meanings. In English, there are compound words, and some words have prefixes or suffixes, but you can't just arbitrarily break a word into its syllables and assign a meaning to every syllable. Imagine if the word "syllable" could be broken down as syl-la-ble, and every person who spoke English could tell you what "syl," "la" and "ble" individually meant. That's the situation in Chinese, for almost every polysyllabic word you can utter. They can almost all be decomposed into syllables that have individual meanings. It's a very different paradigm from English.

tsimionescu 2y ago
Yes, I understand there is a huge difference of the degree to which this applies to the language. I was just pointing out that none of these things should be alien to an English speaker, and even a linguist who only knew English would have had similar struggles to define "word" because of these problems (though of course they could have decided to file them under "exceptions", which doesn't work for Chinese).