Chinese Characters - Polysyllabic Words and Polysyllabic Characters

Polysyllabic Words and Polysyllabic Characters

Most Chinese morphemes (not necessarily words) are monosyllabic and are written with a single character. However, a number of basic morphemes are disyllabic, and this dates back to Classical Chinese. Excluding foreign loan words, these are typically words for plants and small animals. Usually the two characters, which may have no independent meaning apart from poetic abbreviation for the disyllabic word, will each have a phonetic for that syllable and share a common radical. Examples are 蝴蝶 húdié 'butterfly' and 珊瑚 shānhú 'coral'. Note that the 蝴 hú of húdié and the 瑚 hú of shānhú have the same phonetic, 胡, but different radicals (insect and stone, respectively). Neither exists as an independent morpheme except as an abbreviation.

With the fusion of the diminutive -er suffix in Mandarin, monosyllabic words may even be written with two characters, as in 花儿 huār 'flower'.

On the other hand, compound words and set phrases may be conflated into single characters. Common examples are 圕 túshūguǎn 'library', a contraction of 圖書館, and 瓩 qiānwǎ 'kilowatt', a contraction of 千瓦. A four-morpheme word, 社会主义 shèhuì zhǔyì 'socialism', is commonly written with a single character formed by combining the last character, 义, with the radical of the first, 社. This is not a recent phenomenon; in medieval manuscripts 菩薩 púsà 'bodhisattva' is sometimes written with a single character formed of four 十. In the Oracle Bone script, personal names and ritual items are commonly contracted into single characters, and although it is discouraged by language planners, in the modern language phrases such as 七十人 qīshí rén 'seventy people' and 受又(祐) shòu yòu 'receive blessings' are fused into single characters as well. There are elements here of true logographology, where characters represent whole words rather than syllable-morphemes, though some are phrases rather than words. They might be better seen as ligatures. (See Chinese ligatures.)