4 ms·

> Right. That's the point. This clearly shows that Chinese has multisyllabic words. ...but I never said it didn't. I think you're trying to respond to a diffe

> Right. That's the point. This clearly shows that Chinese has multisyllabic words. ...but I never said it didn't. I think you're trying to respond to a different argument than the one I'm making. I'm not trying to say that Chinese only has single-syllable words. I'm saying that it has multisyllable words made up out of single syllable words --- that's what compound words are. All the examples you've given are clearly compound words, including 'flower born' (which I'll admit is not very like a peanut). The article you just linked to uses jī as an example of a word which is only used to make up compound words. But they're still compound words. jī has a meaning of its own (well --- several meanings, depending on context). You glue it together with another word to produce a compound word with additional meaning. That's pretty much the definition of a compound word. I don't know where you're going here --- sorry.

foldr 10y ago
>But they're still compound words. Only in an orthographic sense. For example, the linguist list post that I linked to talks about the bound morpheme -zi. This is written using the character which in classical Chinese was the word for 'child'. But clearly there's no sense in which 'zhuozi' (table) is a "compound word" containing the word for child. It's just that since the final syllable of the word happens to be pronounced the same way as the classical Chinese word for child, it's written using that character. This is a purely orthographic fact. And in fact 'zi' cannot be used by itself as a noun in modern Chinese (except in a few fixed idioms). It's as if English (a) was written like (b): (a) I realize that. (b) I real eyes that. And we then said that 'realize' is a compound word made up of the monosyllabic words 'real' and 'eyes' (which of course "have a different meaning depending on the context").

foldr 10y ago

>But they're still compound words. Only in an orthographic sense. For example, the linguist list post that I linked to talks about the bound morpheme -zi. This is written using the character which in classical Chinese was the word for 'child'. But clearly there's no sense in which 'zhuozi' (table) is a "compound word" containing the word for child. It's just that since the final syllable of the word happens to be pronounced the same way as the classical Chinese word for child, it's written using that character. This is a purely orthographic fact. And in fact 'zi' cannot be used by itself as a noun in modern Chinese (except in a few fixed idioms). It's as if English (a) was written like (b): (a) I realize that. (b) I real eyes that. And we then said that 'realize' is a compound word made up of the monosyllabic words 'real' and 'eyes' (which of course "have a different meaning depending on the context").