John Cowan:

> 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.

If you count them this way, yeah. ;)



But apart from those imported words, there are also things like the
retroflex-inducing 儿 (-r) for fans of Northern Chinese pronunciation:
空儿 kong4+r = "kurrr"
玩儿 wan2+r = "warrr"
It is not even pronounced as a syllable, it just modifies the pronunciation.


Or you could also consider characters which work a bit like bound morphemes;
I've forgotten my good examples for Chinese, but there are words consisting
of two characters where one or both of the characters ONLY occur in this
word. In such a case it's a polysyllabic indigenous morpheme.



Regards,
Berthold