Berthold Frommann wrote:

>
> 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 ¶ù (-r) for fans of Northern Chinese pronunciation:
> ¿Õ¶ù kong4+r = "kurrr"
> Íæ¶ù 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.

Kennedy's famous butterfly, no? (One of the most delightful linguistic
essays I've ever read, incidentally.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...