Raymond A. Brown wrote:
> At 10:22 am -0700 3/7/99, Charles wrote:
> >English and many other langs have a strong sense of what is a word,
> >whereas in Chinese and others it is much more fluid.
>
> And that, whether you like it or not, is primarily because of the different
> written _conventions_ prevailing in Europe & China over the past couple of
> millennia.
I doubt this to be true in Chinese; it has a very different way
of regarding word-ness, but my information is second-hand, admittedly.
However, your information on Rumanian etc. was valuable, so though
I don't "like it" I'm afraid I've finally learned a bit about clitics.
> No English speaker that I've ever met - and I've met quite a few in my 60
> years - intuitively considers 'a/an' to be an unstressed variant of 'one'.
It's pretty clear to anyone who learns the French/Spanish word for "a/an".
[about clitics]
> But how we write the things is convention.
> In the western
> Romancelangs we _write_ them as separate words while in Romanian we append
> the article and write it as 'part of the preceding word'.
> texts of ancient Greek always print enclitics as
> separate 'words'; but the change in written accent on the preceding words
> shows clearly they are enclitics.
>
> Proclitics on the other hand are always written in Europeanlangs either as
> separate 'words' or hyphenated, but never AFAIK fully prefixed. But this
> is pure convention and can differ in practice within the same language.
> >Terminology not only confuses, it mutates too quickly to remember.
>
> With respect, 'enclitikos' was first coined by the ancients; its first
> recorded use AFAIK in in the writings of the Greek grammarian Tryphon in
> the 1st cent. BC.; and the adj. 'encliticus' was used by the Roman
> grammarians. The term 'procltic' was certainly used by grammarians of the
> last century and I have little doubt the term is quite a few centuries
> older.
Well that's it, I'm only up to Herodotus.