1498: Impossible Definitions Jan 18, 2019

In linguistics, there are many unknown and perhaps unsolvable questions, such as what a word is, what a language is, and how it is that something is considered grammatical or not. Nevertheless, one can still make claims about how certain word orders are grammatical in a given language and not another. This apparent contradiction may come from many sources, but aside from the fact that some notions are simply traditional, the issue here is that sometimes, as with the case of grammar, everyone understands that it exists, but disagree on how. In other cases, like the concept of a word, which some would indeed say does not exist, it is either spoken about as simply a shorthand, or people will talk around it and use units like phrases or morphemes.

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