1166: Contractions: One or Two Words? Feb 17, 2018

If you listen to some speaking a completely foreign language, you won’t hear pauses between words. Some languages make this easier than others to decipher, such as Estonian, which always has stress on the first syllable of a word (though the idea of what a word is has no major consensus). This lack of division is made even more apparent when looking at words that together influence the pronunciation, for instance ‘in’ is pronounced [ɪn] usually, but before certain sounds, like [p], it becomes [ɪm] (2). Considering that there is no actual space between words when spoken, and that words can still influence the way other words are pronounced, there is not really any reason that contractions, or arguably words like ‘another’, should be considered one word. “ ‘Tis” and “isn’t”, or more extremely even, “won’t” are considered to be one word, but act grammatically as two. Moreover, most of the time, at least one element of the contraction is usually unchanged at all. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with writing these together—the International Phonetic Alphabet just writes all words together anyway—but it can give people a skewed view of grammar, and word-count less importantly.

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