Translation

The Word in Different Languages

a.       What is a word

                                    Word is the smallest unit which we would expect to possess individual meaning is the word. The word is the smallest unit of languages that can be used by itself. For our present purposes, we can define the written word with more precision as any sequence of letters with an orthographic space on either side.  

                                    Many of us think of the word as the basic meaningful element in a language. Meaning can be carried by units smaller than the word. More often, however, it is carried by units much more complex than the single word and by various structures and linguistic devices.

b.      Is there a one-to-one relationship  between word and meaning ?

           Elements of meaning which are represented by several orthographic words in one language, say English, may be represented by one orthographic word in another , and vice versa.  For intance, tennis player is written as one word in Turkish : tenisci ; if it is cheap as one word in Japanese : yasukattara ; but the verb type is rendered by three words in Spanish : pasar a maquina. This suggests that there is no one-to-one correspondence between orthographic words and elements of meaning within or across languages.

c.       Introducing morphemes

           In order to isolate elements of meaning in words and deal with them more effectively, some linguists have suggested the term morpheme to describe the minimal formal element of meaning in language , as distinct from word, which may or may not contain several elements of meaning. Thus, an important difference between morphemes and words is that a morpheme cannot be further analysed.

                                    To take an example from English, inconceivable is written as one word but consists of three morphemes : in, meaning ‘not’ , conceive meaning ‘think of or imagine’ , and able meaning ‘ able to be, fit to be ‘. Some morphemes have grammatical fuctions such as marking plurality (funds), gender ( manageress) and tense (considered). Morphemes do not always have such clearly defined boundaries. The above theoretical distinction between words and morphemes attempts, by the large, to account for elements of meaning which are expressed on the surface.