Chinese: monosyllabic or polysyllabic?

[wix]

I have quoted the post by Quest in another thread here in order to begin discussion about whether Chinese is a monosyllabic or polysyllabic language.

english might be a phonetic script' date=' but admit it, you read it pictographically. when you read, u skim through word by word instead of reading each syllable. somehow, the shape and the order of letters, not the sound, help you understand what the word is. of course that is logical, because you use your eyes not your ears to read. However, english can work well that way because it is multi syllabic and there are not many homonyms. but chinese is mono syllabic with zillions of homonyms, for example

"wo3 bu4 xiang3 qu4 xiang3 ni3 xiang3 xiang4 he2 xiang4 wang3 de shi4."

我不想去想你想象和向往的事。

"I don't want to think about what you imagine and crave."

there's no way you can read that sentence in pinyin pictographically without making out the sounds in your mind first then interpret the sounds. and that leads to one more step in processing.

i've heard someone talked about you can read what you can hear, true, but you dont read with your ears. your eyes read light, your ears read sound. reading sounds with your eyes requires more brain processing.

but chinese is mono syllabic

this is off topic & should possibly go into a new thread, but chinese is not monosyllabic

[Guest Anonymous]

Chinese is definitely polysyllabic and not monosyllabic. People often incorrectly assume Chinese is monosyllabic because the written language is made up of characters and each character stands by itself. However, if you look at Japanese and Korean (more or less), their written language also consists of characters, be it Kana or Hangul, but their languages are polysyllabic.

There are numerous Chinese words that are polysyllabic. Just off the top of my head, hudie (butterfly) has two syllables, bangongshi (office) has three syllables, and tushuguan also has three syllables. I'm sure you can come up with even more by yourself.

BTW, most people don't understand that zi doesn't translate to word in English. Chinese words are actually ci. Just look at the definition of the word, word

A sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes.

[wix]

I agree with Kulong here. If you need any further convincing please read "Monosyllabic" Chinese, an extract from the book Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. A few selected quotes from the text are below.

There is a lay misconception that if characters are more than letters and have meaning, then they must represent words, and that these "words" are all one syllable long. Noting that Mandarin has fewer than 1,300 distinct syllables, various authors have gone on to associate these two "facts" about the language and have concluded erroneously that Chinese have restricted vocabularies, cannot understand each other in speech, and have trouble with abstractions.

No language can get by today with only a few thousand monosyllabic words. However, if each of the monosyllabic morphemes of a language has its own unique graphic sign that shields the morphemes (in some cases artificially) from attrition and draws attention to their existence as units, then there is no need for words to exceed two syllables in length, since, mathematically, the format can accommodate millions of word-length expressions.

[Quest]

actually, i do support the idea that chinese is polysyllabic; it was the logographic script that prevented the formation of distinct and truely polysyllabic words.

[smithsgj]

The script is irrelevant, isn't it? It's just a way of representing the language symbolically. There exist languages that lack a writing system: this doesn't prevent experts from working out where the word boundaries are.

Chinese is morphologically monosyllabic, by and large. I mean that the morphemes, the smallest units of meaning, are generally of one syllable (and represented by one character). Exceptions are hudie (butterfly) cited by OP, boli (glass), kafei.