At 02:56 PM 12/13/2003, Peter Daniels wrote:

>Bill Bright claims that the famous three-syllable character for
>'library' (transcribed tushuguan in Hockett 2003 and Mair, WWS) exists
>almost exclusively to demonstrate that at least one three-syllable
>character exists. Can you confirm or deny?

Three-character/morpheme/grapheme/syllable word...

If broken down to constituent parts by individual characters (let
numbers = tone marks):

tu2 = illustration/drawing/map
shu1 = writing/book
guan3 = building/hall

However, tu2shu1 is a compound comprising 'printed materials' (of
which the majority were books and illustrations. Constituent compounding
would be as follows:

[[[tu][shu]]guan]

This singular *lexical item* is not written with a single
character/logogram/morphogram/etc.

-Patrick