Is Word a Fundamental Linguistic Thing?

Linguist Martin Haspelmath has argued that there's no such thing as a word cross linguistically. In Chinese you don't write with spaces, and it is much less clear what counts as a word in the language. This is partly because of the nature of Chinese, which doesn't have as clear word boundaries as English. People here are using phrases to mean different things when they say 'word' for example.

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