[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 naive 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 vowel (_-mue_, animate plural).  Such features as accent, cadence, and the treatment of consonants and vowels within the body of a word are often useful as aids in the external demarcation of the word, but they must by no means be interpreted, as is sometimes done, as themselves responsible for its psychological existence.  They at best but strengthen a feeling of unity that is already present on other grounds.