Berthold Frommann scripsit:
> Calling them morphographs (denoting morphemes) might be a
> good idea, but then there will be someone pointing out the handful of
> examples where one morpheme is written with more than one hanzi.
Hardly a handful any more: ka1fei1 'coffee', a1si1pi3lin2 'aspirin',
sha1fa1 'sofa', bu4er3shi2wei2ke4 'Bolshevik', and of course ke3kou3ke3le4
and its rival bai3shi4ke3le4 are all monomorphemic, but are properly
written with the same number of syllables as characters (that is, one
zi4 for every zi4, to put it tautologously). And there are hundreds of these.
--
John Cowan
jcowan@... www.ccil.org/~cowan www.reutershealth.com
"If he has seen farther than others,
it is because he is standing on a stack of dwarves."
--Mike Champion, describing Tim Berners-Lee (adapted)