OT: is this real?

[Krsqk]

Originally posted by DavidG:
on another note isn't it pretty much accepted that real names are not considerd words? Isn't the name of a chemical or protein really a real name? I mean I can call my kid ASDFASDFGASDFSDAFASDFASFAHOEL and that would be a string of letters with a meaning but it sure ain't a word.

Actually, in a grammatical sense, names are words. Even names with no real pronunciation, such as Krsqk are. Now to be fair, 1) they only acquire meaning by association with a personality, and 2) most people assign (at least mentally) a pronunciation to any word they see, even if an incorrect one.

Defining "word" as "an ordered collection of letters which conveys meaning" (or some such) does have problems, though. First, where's the differentiation between ordinary words and abbreviations/acronyms? Both FBI and UNSCOM are ordered collections of letters and both have meaning; but neither are words in the sense that "Fyron" or "alien" are.

One could argue that words are valid only as representation of thoughts. A counter-argument could be that many Languages are capable of representing the concept of a pencil, but with obviously different words. The counter to that, then, would be that speech is a higher-level thought process than visualizing/conceptualizing, and that words, being a proprietary subset of speech, are also more complex than the concepts conveyed by them. Or something like that.

My oversimplified summation of the argument is this:
1) No one denies that collections of letters not traditionally defined as words can have meaning;
2) Conservative linguists would not typically define FBI or UNSCOM or a fully-expanded DNA code as words;
3) Deconstructivist linguists would probably define FBI and UNSCOM as words, given that they occur commonly enough to convey meaning to an intended target audience (effective communication of meaning determines status), while the DNA example would probably not be considered a word, as it is unlikely to be used effectively in communication;
4) A few would define nearly any meaningful combination of letters as a word, based upon its potential to convey meaning.

The linguistic conservative in me wants to say word != meaning. The social conservative in me wants to say redefinition as word = meaning is part of the quest of the deviant linguists to be granted normalcy. The paranoid and conspiracy nut in my household just noticed that it has the fingerprints of the Trilateral Commission and the CFR all over it. I can't say any more now, since they're listening--I'll contact you in the usual way later.

[ December 29, 2003, 04:18: Message edited by: Krsqk ]