The concept of word in Sinitic

In the following posts, we've been tackling the thorny, multifaceted question of whether Vietnamese has words and lexemes, as opposed to having syllables and morphemes:

• "Diacriticless Vietnamese on a sign in San Francisco" (9/30/18)
• "Words in Vietnamese" (10/2/18)

During the course of our discussions, the parallel question of whether Sinitic had words or not also came up.  Let me put it this way:  although there was no concept of "word" in Sinitic before the 20th century, there were Sinitic words, going all the way back to the oracle bone inscriptions (the first stage of Chinese writing) more than three thousand years ago, as documented in these posts and dozens of others:

• "Polysyllabic characters in Chinese writing" (8/2/11)
• "Words in Mandarin: twin kle twin kle lit tle star" (8/14/12)
• "Polysyllabic characters revisited " (6/18/15)
• "A new polysyllabic character" (4/3/16)
• "Yet another polysyllabic Chinese character" (10/31/16)

In 2002-2003, when I was teaching at the University of Hong Kong, I had a Chinese linguistics class consisting of 72 students (the same number as Confucius' disciples!).  They were among the brightest humanities students in Hong Kong, but it was all I could do in the course of a semester to get them to comprehend the difference between a word and a character.  No matter which angle I addressed the matter from, their eyeballs would go rolling back into their head, and they looked as though they were suffering from a migraine.  Even now, a decade and a half later, when my classes are full of very smart students from across the Sinosphere, a curtain falls down over their gaze when I try to explain what the difference between a character and a word is.

Indeed, before the first half of the 20th century, there was no word for "word".  The word for "character", zì 字, was clear enough, but for lexical units larger than that, one had to resort to the expression cí 辭 ("phrase").  When the first dictionaries that were not strictly centered on characters (i.e., zìdiǎn 字典) were published, they were referred to as cídiǎn 辭典 (lit., "phrase dictionary"):

• Cíyuán 辭源 (Fountain / source of Phrases) 1915
• Cíhǎi 辭海 (Sea of phrases) 1938

During the first half of the 20th century, modern Western linguistics began to seep into language studies in China, until finally scholars there decided that they needed to devise a word for "word".  What they did was borrow the term for a particular type of relatively vernacular poetry, cí 詞, which was popular around a thousand years ago, and assign it to fill the vocabulary gap for "word".  Nonetheless, as late as a quarter of a century or so ago, I was on a panel at a meeting of the Association for Asian Studies with one of China's most distinguished grammarians of the day, and she made the amazing statement that language specialists in China were still striving "to excavate the words" of Sinitic.

So now, at least, we have 字典 zìdiǎn ("character dictionaries) and cídiǎn 詞典 ("word dictionaries").  Progress!