When do sounds become words?: Philosophy Forums

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When do sounds become words?

mway
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Posted 06/10/09 - 07:52 PM: Subject: When do sounds become words?	#1
Hi all, I was having an argument with someone the other day who protests that art of swearing (in all forms, including just swearing for no apparent reason). I on the other hand swear all the time. My question is this: If you take a word like 'fuck', it has two syllables, so when you speak it, there is a time gap (small) between the 'fu' and 'ck'. How long can this time gap be to still constitute the word being said? milliseconds? seconds? opinions?
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NothingtoSay
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Posted 06/10/09 - 09:09 PM:	#2
I'd guess this can differ depending on who's hearing it. i.e., A person who never heard the word wouldn't consider it a word regardless of the duration of the gap, would he? Edited by NothingtoSay on 06/10/09 - 09:26 PM

mway
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Posted 06/10/09 - 09:57 PM:	#3
NothingtoSay wrote: I'd guess this can differ depending on who's hearing it. i.e., A person who never heard the word wouldn't consider it a word regardless of the duration of the gap, would he? True, so let's assume they do have an understanding of the word.
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bert1
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Posted 06/10/09 - 10:42 PM:	#4
'Fuck' is only one syllable. I don't know what the answer to your question would be for a two-syllable word like 'bugger', though. I suspect that it's just to do with short-term memory. While the previous sound (bugg-) is still 'echoing' in your mind's ear, the following sound (-er) will appear relative to it, and we get meaning (as meaning is in the relations between things). But once you forget the previous sound, the new one appears unrelated to the previous one, and meaning is lost. (All this assumes an understanding of 'bugger' in the first place, of course.) Edited by bert1 on 06/10/09 - 10:49 PM. Reason: clarity
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Schlitz
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Posted 06/10/09 - 10:49 PM:	#5
The rules for deciding which sounds count as words in a natural language like English belong to that language's syntax. I think you're somewhat off the mark with your analysis of "fuck"- it's only got one syllable. That terminal aspiration of "ck" is really a shadow vowel, and it doesn't count towards the number of syllables in the word. I think it's pretty simple to tell in English where one syllable begins and the other ends by looking at the spelling, which, even though it's not perfectly regular, is a transcription of the sounds of speech: check for consonants after vowels. It's just a guess, but I think a syllable ends if the associated vowel has no letters behind it, in which case it ends the word, or it has a syntactic arrangement of consonants after it.

Cuthbert
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Posted 06/11/09 - 12:29 AM:	#6
If I say 'fan - bloody - tastic', have I used the word 'fantastic'? Sort of, yes. But no, sort of, too. There's a technical term in linguistics for splitting words in that way, but I've forgotten what it is.

cosscos
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Posted 06/11/09 - 03:06 AM:	#7
Yes, Mway. it's one syllable, but 'bucker' is two syllable.

makerowner
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Posted 06/11/09 - 06:31 AM:

Cuthbert wrote:
If I say 'fan - bloody - tastic', have I used the word 'fantastic'? Sort of, yes. But no, sort of, too. There's a technical term in linguistics for splitting words in that way, but I've forgotten what it is.

Infixation. There are some languages where this is a regular process, just like we use the suffixes -s, -ed, -ing, etc.

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Cadrache
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Posted 06/11/09 - 01:08 PM:	#9
If I say "ooga" and you always go "blagh" then ooga has become a word.
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Cuthbert
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Posted 06/12/09 - 04:25 AM:	#10
Blagh! (Meaning: "I disagree.")

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