> It‘s irrelevant if you write it as one word, you certainly say it as one.
True, but you say everything as one word. You produce "It's irrelevant if you write it as one word" as one word. It has substitutable parts, which is also true of German compound words.
People are shockingly gullible about the fact that compound nouns in German are written without spaces while the grammatically identical compound nouns that are so common in English are written with them, as if spaces occurred in speech.
> People are shockingly gullible about the fact that compound nouns in German are written without spaces while the grammatically identical compound nouns that are so common in English are written with them, as if spaces occurred in speech.
Yeah. And distinctions that don't even occur in speech are arguably not suited to define the general concept of "word". You wouldn't know from speaking that "coalmine" has no space but "file name" has. I would count them both as single words, because they are single compound nouns.
The "space theory of words" would mean that languages without a writing system don't have "words", or that people who can't read also can't distinguish "words", which is clearly nonsense.
No you don't. There are stress patterns in words that wouldn't exist if a sentence was all one word - in English words have at most one primary stressed syllable, and a sentence may have multiple such syllables.
Those stress patterns already do exist in sentences. What do you think the difference is between a word that is pronounced without its citation form primary stress ("at most one primary stressed syllable") and a sentence that is pronounced with several more or less equally stressed syllables?
The difference between primary and secondary word stress disappears when the word is put into a sentence.
There are stress patterns in sentences that don't exist in lexical words, but they do exist in compound phrases, and there is no symmetrical situation of stress patterns in words that don't happen in sentences.
Edit: It‘s irrelevant if you write it as one word, you certainly say it as one.