於 Jul 9, 2004 10:22 AM 時，John Cowan 提到：

> Modern Mandarin Chinese definitely isn't monosyllabic, though most of
> its
> morphemes are (with the exceptions I mentioned earlier). The other
> Sinitic
> languages are closer to monosyllabic, and their common ancestor Middle
> Chinese was even closer.
>

Well, I'm not sure that Cantonese, at least, is any more monosyllabic
than Mandarin. The sentence should be rewritten. It's intent is to
say that since Chinese is isolating, has morphemes which are almost
always one syllable, and forms almost all words as compound, its
current writing system (whatever you want to call it) works well.

(Indeed, I'd argue that for all its complexity, the current writing
system for Chinese works better for Chinese than would an alphabet,
which is one reason IMHO why pinyin failed to become the main way of
writing Chinese as was originally hoped. When you gave your list of
polysyllabic morphemes, since you did it in Mandarin romanization, it
was a lot harder for me to understand than it would have been in
hanzi.)

========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@...
jhjenkins@...
http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/