II. Some distinctive features of Chinese

Chinese is basically polysyllabic in its word structure, although its morphemes (i.e. the smallest component part of words in meaning) are mostly monosyllabic. Normally, one syllable in spoken Chinese corresponds strictly to only one single character in writing, and one syllable equals one morpheme in general. There are quite lot of monosyllabic words such as r5n (person, human), ti`n (day, sky), d3 (big), l1i (ome) in modern Chinese, but they are significantly fewer in number compared with disyllabic words. Moreover, compound words such as y9uy0ng ch^ (swimming pool) and ch1 b4i (teacup), and derivational morphemes such as xu5 (to learn, to study) in xu5sh4ng (student), xu5x^ (study), and xu5xi3o (school) are very common in Mandarin. While a word may consist of just one single morpheme, it may also consist of two, three, or even more morphemes such as in di3n hu3 (eletric-sppeech: telephone), z* x^ng ch4 (self-walk-vehicle: bicycle), x%n di3n t{ j*l} q* (heart-electric-chart-recording-device: electrocardiograph). Since words but not morphemes are the very basic units in language use, Chinese should be considered as polysyllabic in its word structure.

Back: Chinese is an isolating/analytic language morphologically and syntactically
Next: Chinese is a Topic-Prominent language