Andre Poenitz wrote:
> Would "A word is the thing that 99% of the literate population considers
> a word" be an acceptable definition? ;-)
I don't think you'll come to 99% agreement actually.
Anyway, that's another story. In the case we are discussing (allowing to alter
a language within a "word" or not), I do not see why a blank whould be
crucial. In other words, I do not see why you could not alter the language
within a word such as "die Allez-les-bleus-Rufer" (even though I would
probably not do that), but could in the case of "kaufe ein" (which is, in a
linguistic sense, a grammatical word belonging to *one* lexeme, namely
EINKAUFEN).
> Actually, if "kaufe ein" was one word, the space would not qualify as
> "Wortzwischenraum". Which sounds ... odd.
A blank is not 100% identical to a word boundary (which again is not the same
as a "Wortzwischenraum"). German orthography tries to come close to that, but
not always matches it. Other orthographies have different principles.
In general, it is problematic to describe linguistic units from the script-
perspective only ("written language bias"). If you say, a sentence is what is
delimited by punctuation, you get into a hell of a mess. But I won't open the
next can of worms (there are more than 300 different linguistic definitions of
what is a "sentence").
Jürgen
