Re: Maybe a naive question...

En réponse à Harald Stoiber <hstoiber@...>:

> A wonderful evening to you all!
> (whenever the next evening may take place in your timezone *gg*)
>
Thanks! (my evening takes place at the same time as yours, so double
thanks ;))) )

> The past few days I was wondering about how the mechanisms work that
> separate words from each other in continuously flowing speech. Having
> developped a written language I now search for a spoken one.
>
Well, normally you should do the other way round, but that's not a deadly sin
either :))) . Since a language is first a spoken reality (its written form is
only a representation of it), you should first work on the spoken language, and
then on the written form.

> When a trailing vowel and a leading consonant are adjacent across two
> words, then how would the distinction between those words occur in
> flowing speech? The following hypothetical example may demonstrate
> this:
>
> ne vani
>
> In case longer words receive stress on the next-to-last syllable then
> how would "nevani" sound different from "ne vani"? That's what puzzles
> me. There are a lot languages which stress the next-to-last syllable...
> any hints anybody?
>
An interesting question, and not naive at all. Actually, it comes down to the
question "what is a word" which has been asked for millenia, and still didn't
find a satisfying answer. Look at this wonderful site:
http://home.bluemarble.net/~langmin/
and find the essay nr.87 (entitled: YOULLMIXUPEVERYDAYWORDS). It's a very good
essay about your very question and shows very well that the notion "word" in
spoken languages is anything but clear. Indeed, since speech is connected,
limits between words are extremely difficult to define, and more or less
depending on the language. Moreover, the written word is always there to poison
the thoughts in giving the impression that words have definite frontiers. That
is not so. Look at the French sentence "je te l'ai bien dit". The written
sentence counts 6 words (an apostrophe separates words in French writing). The
spoken form [St@,lEbjE~'di], on the other hand, is not separable at all. All
its components treated as separate entities when written are so blended
together that no word can be separated from the others. Moreover, the whole
sentence falls under a single stress pattern (but French doesn't have "word
stress" but "phrase stress", maybe just a change of terminology in order to
avoid the difficult discussion of what is a word in spoken French). In short,
in spoken French you cannot speak easily about words. The smallest independent
entity you can find is something you can call the "phrase", which would in many
other languages be considered to be made of various words. Note that the same
situation is found in languages like Inuktitut, called "polysynthetic
languages", and that's the reason why I say that French is really a
polysynthetic language disguised as an analytic language.

As for the example you gave, ie. "ne vani" versus "nevani", well... If the
language has regular next-to-last-syllable stress, and "ne" is unstressed (it
if was stressed there would be no problem since you'd have "NE VAni"
against "neVAni"), then the answer is that, in absence of any context, the
people probably wouldn't distinguish "ne vani" from "nevani". It would probably
lead to nice puns if the meanings of both expressions were suitable enough :) .
So the thing would be ambiguous. And so what? Ambiguity is a component of all
languages, they all have it and even use it (puns exist in all languages in the
world). So the problem is not that big. If your language doesn't seem to have a
good way to segregate words in connected speech, unless you're making a logical
language it's not a problem. As I said, the very notion of "word" is not well
defined for speech anyway.

I still invite you to read the essay I talked about above. It explains in
better words what I have clumsily tried to explain here.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.