Hi. In the previous video, I introduced you to the world of words, and I've shown how words are a very fundamental concept in understanding human language. And that's because all languages seem to have words. They seem to form words, and those words are then put together into sentences. Now, even though this is something fundamental to all languages, languages can also differ. And we've made a typology of languages. A typology consisting of four types. Namely isolating, fusional, agglutinative, and polysynthetic languages. I am going to discuss the world of words more now with my students, Inge and Marten. >> Okay. So, I'll ask the first question, because I was wondering, if you look at all these languages they form words in different ways. But do some languages, then have more words than others in the end? >> Yeah. Well, which language, kind of language would you think has more words than others? I would say that polysynthetic languages have more words maybe, because they can combine different parts of words in different ways, and then you have more results in the end. Right, so in a polysynthetic language you can say, I eat chicken. And that's one word. >> Mm-hm. >> Okay. In another kind of language you don't typically have that word, so that would be already one word more, in the polysynthetic language. Now, you can also say, I eat bacon, I eat rice, and I eat all these different kinds of things. That gives you many more words. That's what you could think, and I think it makes sense to think that. The problem is if you would really want to be serious about, you know, comparing languages in how many words they have, you would have to count them. >> Mm-hm. >> You would have to count the number of words in a language, but in all of these languages the point about whole typology is that these languages have ways of forming new words. So it means you never stop counting. You count. At some point when you think you can stop counting, there's your word formation rules. And they can add new words to the language. Okay, you count those more, but there's always going to be your word formation rules, which gives you more opportunities of creating new words. So although, indeed, it feels like it makes sense to think that polysynthetic languages have more words, you cannot make this very precise. Furthermore, there would be one class of languages for which this would not be true. This would be the isolating languages. All right, so isolating languages don't have ways of forming new words, typically. But there's two things to adapt. In the first place, a language can still borrow words from another language, like internet. And in the second place, truly isolating languages, in this sense, don't exist. They can always create new words, for instance, by putting together two words. So Chinese can borrow the word for internet. And then it can make, still make a word for internet provider by putting together two words to make a new word. So, even in such a language you cannot really count the total number of words. >> Okay, so the total number of words is infinite you could say? But if you look at this from another perspective. So if now looks at counting words in this way, but if you look at it from the perspective concepts I can imagine that different languages have maybe different concepts. One language could have a concept for internet or computer. And the other maybe doesn't have that concept, so they also wouldn't have that word. Or could you then say, that for example, English, which has those concepts maybe, has more words than other languages? >> Right. So, indeed. So that's what you could think. So if you take this concept of a language seriously, and we say English, with its hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, of speakers. All of them having different interests, being interested in different topics, being able to talk about those different interests, or some people are interested in technology, like Internet, can talk about that. Other people are interested in fishing, and can talk about that. So, they will have words for all of those different things. Whereas, speakers of a language well, if they, if you take a language of 100 speakers, well, they will have only so many interests, and they will not have words for things which they are not interested in. So, that would be another way of counting, would give you another kind of classification. The problem is something that we have seen in a previous module, namely these languages themselves are very difficult to pinpoint, to give boundaries to. So are we talking about English? Or are we talking about American English? Or are we talking Philadelphia English? Or are we talking about the language of an individual? And the latter might be the only one where you can really count. So, how many words does an individual know? But at that point then, the speaker of English will not know all words of English, because they will not be interested in fishing, so will not know the words which are related to fishing. So, and there's no reason to think that a speaker of English will know more words than the speaker of a language with only 100 speakers. >> Okay. >> So, I was, I have a sort of different question because I was learning a new language, Catalan, but of course, I wasn't reading a dictionary. But I was listening to it on the radio so that I can get a feel for it. But my problem was that I really couldn't tell where the word boundaries were. >> So, I really don't, I, based on hearing alone, I couldn't determine if it was an isolating or an agglutinative language. And, of course, I had a course book. But I was wondering, if you listen to a new language, how do you know where the word boundaries are? >> Yeah. Well, I think, that's a very good question. I have that experience myself. You try to learn a new language. >> One of the things which is most difficult in the beginning is listening. You listen to it, you just hear blah blah blah, you don't hear any kind of word boundary. These blah blah blah, it's not supposed to be Catalan, but some kind of language which you don't know. You don't hear where the individual words are. I'm sure that you, once you have learned a new language, you have this experience that in the beginning you just hear people speak you have no idea where the word boundaries are. And the reason is it's really also not clear and the reason for that is we don't speak with word boundaries. When I speak I don't put spaces like when I write, I _ don't _ put _ spaces. I don't put spaces. I put everything together. If you take the signal of what I say, you put it in the computer, you see one signal. There's not, there's no empty space in-between. There's no silence in-between two words. So, you learn this only by experience, by being exposed to it enough. You have your course book that helps so you can see the individual words, if you've seen them often enough maybe then you learn how to >> Yeah. >> distinguish words, so don't worry. >> Okay, thanks. But, so I have a course book but there's of course a situation where you learn a language without a course book and that's when you're learning your first language as a child. So, I was wondering how children learn these word boundaries. >> Yeah. Right. So, right. So, now we have somebody who doesn't have a course book. A child actually doesn't know what to expect, right? How, so the child somehow must know that there are, she has to distinguish words to begin with. And they do so. Well, there's various factors involved, can you think of anything? >> So the first thing that I thought was that parents will just repeat single words. So especially in the beginning they say, say Mamma, Mamma, >> Right. >> Mamma and then at some point the childs gets annoyed as a human. >> [LAUGH] >> Then just says, Mamma. And that of course works with other words like potato. >> Right, yeah, well that, it might be one factor, so that would be the first, our first factor. So, it probably does play a role. It's also known that mothers, or caretakers, they speak slightly differently to their children than to other people. Say like that. So, that means you make certain things more precise. Okay, so that's one factor and you may even make the word boundaries more precise or as you say, you say every word individually, that would be the first factor. So caretakers will take care that you also hear individual words sometime. >> Yeah. >> Given that, once you know that you can actually use that for maybe something which would be a second factor, which is now I know the word potato because my father says potato to me all the time so, and then I hear somebody say "I eat potato", well I recognize this particular thing there. Same potato, and now I know that "I eat" must be some kind of activity related to potato. Then hear somebody say, "I eat rice." Okay, now I discover that "I eat", I know, I don't maybe know exactly what it means. But at least this same, this activity related to food. So rice must be another word. That could be a second kind of factor there. Probably already more important than the first factor because most words definitely you don't hear like this. It's actually very unlikely that you hear more than just a few hundred words. Like this. In the end you will know tens of thousands of words. The third factor is just that you will recognize statistically that certain sounds go together very often. So you listen to these sounds and certain things go together very often. I eat rice. Well, in "I eat rice" there's "eat rice." Those things go together. But they don't go together all that often as "rice" does. So in this way, by doing this kind of analysis, so that must mean, if this is true, it must mean that children do this kind of counting in their head. And if they do they can discover what are words in this kind of stream of sounds which they hear all around them. In summary, we've seen that languages seem to differ in the number of words they have, but at the end of the day we cannot really count the number of words in any language and therefore we cannot really make that comparison. We have also seen that it's difficult to see or hear exactly what the words in a language are. But there's various tricks, which you as a second language learner, or a baby, as a first language learner, can use to determine what the words in her language are. In the next video we're going to put words together in sentences.
