3 ms·

So technically in linguistics, the spoken language is considered the ground truth while the way the language is written is just a crude representation of the sp

So technically in linguistics, the spoken language is considered the ground truth while the way the language is written is just a crude representation of the spoken language. What this implies is that a space being used between two tokens doesn't actually make it two words. You can still consider that to be one word. (Also, if you wanna go even more meta, there isn't even a widely agreed upon definition for what a word even is in linguistics!)

Tainnor 2y ago
> (Also, if you wanna go even more meta, there isn't even a widely agreed upon definition for what a word even is in linguistics!) To be even more precise, there are several competing definitions of what "word" should mean that don't always agree. E.g. if you go by the criterion "word" = lexeme (dictionary unit), then something like "kick the bucket" would be a "word".