Independent word or as part of a larger word. These transitional cases,

puzzling as they may be on occasion, do not, however, materially weaken

the case for the psychological validity of the word. Linguistic

experience, both as expressed in standardized, written form and as

tested in daily usage, indicates overwhelmingly that there is not, as a

rule, the slightest difficulty in bringing the word to consciousness as

a psychological reality. No more convincing test could be desired than

this, that the naive Indian, quite unaccustomed to the concept of the

written word, has nevertheless no serious difficulty in dictating a text

to a linguistic student word by word; he tends, of course, to run his

words together as in actual speech, but if he is called to a halt and is

made to understand what is desired, he can readily isolate the words as

such, repeating them as units. He regularly refuses, on the other hand,

to isolate the radical or grammatical element, on the ground that it

"makes no sense."[6] What, then, is the objective criterion of the word?

The speaker and hearer feel the word, let us grant, but how shall we

justify their feeling? If function is not the ultimate criterion of the

word, what is?

[Footnote 6: These oral experiences, which I have had time and again as

a field student of American Indian languages, are very neatly confirmed

by personal experiences of another sort. Twice I have taught intelligent

young Indians to write their own languages according to the phonetic

system which I employ. They were taught merely how to render accurately

the sounds as such. Both had some difficulty in learning to break up a

word into its constituent sounds, but none whatever in determining the

words. This they both did with spontaneous and complete accuracy. In the

hundreds of pages of manuscript Nootka text that I have obtained from

one of these young Indians the words, whether abstract relational

entities like English _that_ and _but_ or complex sentence-words like

the Nootka example quoted above, are, practically without exception,

isolated precisely as I or any other student would have isolated them.

Such experiences with naïve speakers and recorders do more to convince

one of the definitely plastic unity of the word than any amount of

purely theoretical argument.]

It is easier to ask the question than to answer it. The best that we can

do is to say that the word is one of the smallest, completely satisfying

bits of isolated "meaning" into which the sentence resolves itself. It

cannot be cut into without a disturbance of meaning, one or the other or

both of the severed parts remaining as a helpless waif on our hands. In

practice this unpretentious criterion does better service than might be

supposed. In such a sentence as _It is unthinkable_, it is simply

impossible to group the elements into any other and smaller "words" than

the three indicated. _Think_ or _thinkable_ might be isolated, but as

neither _un-_ nor _-able_ nor _is-un_ yields a measurable satisfaction,

we are compelled to leave _unthinkable_ as an integral whole, a

miniature bit of art. Added to the "feel" of the word are frequently,

but by no means invariably, certain external phonetic characteristics.

Chief of these is accent. In many, perhaps in most, languages the single

word is marked by a unifying accent, an emphasis on one of the

syllables, to which the rest are subordinated. The particular syllable

that is to be so distinguished is dependent, needless to say, on the

special genius of the language. The importance of accent as a unifying

feature of the word is obvious in such English examples as

_unthinkable_, _characterizing_. The long Paiute word that we have

analyzed is marked as a rigid phonetic unit by several features, chief

of which are the accent on its second syllable (_wii'_-"knife") and the

slurring ("unvoicing," to use the technical phonetic term) of its final