Re: *****SPAM***** VMs: Pointing at spaces

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 26 Feb 2005, Nick Pelling wrote:
> At 18:54 25/02/2005 -0700, John E Koontz wrote:
> >I don't think 'a/an' is ever written that way.
>
> Even more tangentially, I find "a norange" makes more sense (though I'm
> ambivalent about "a napron", and very much against "a nadder").

Or newt ~ eft and more recent other and nother.  Of course, the tendency
of n to realign between the article and the noun reflects or is made
possible by the proclitic status of the indefinite article.  A classical
example of repeated transfers back and forth between article(s) and nouns
is French licorne < l'icorne < une icorne < unicorne.

Anyway, clisis makes word divisions in orthography a potentially complex
issue.  In essence this is the area where the phonological conception of
what a word is may not coincide with the syntactic or at last the
grammatical conception of word.  We're taught in school that a word is a
word is a word, but, unfortunately, it isn't.  There are several
components to the conception of word, and they don't quite coincide.

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