ABSTRACT
In any language with a long literary tradition, and a script which conventionally isolates one speech-segment as a 'word', the consciousness of such a unit must have been present when the conventions of the script were first established, and a feedback from the process of learning to read and write in subsequent times has reinforced that consciousness. I do not propose, therefore, to speak about the identification of the 'word' as a segment of utterance, beyond the following few remarks.
