What is a Chinese word?

What is a Chinese word?

By: Wang Yujiang

An English word is a letter or several letters between the spaces or punctuations in a sentence. However, there are no spaces for us to recognize the words in Chinese writing.

What is a Chinese word? Apart from punctuation, there are only words in an English sentence. Apart from punctuation, there are only Chinese characters in Chinese sentences. Both Chinese characters and English words are the units in a sentence. Therefore, Chinese characters are the words in Chinese writing.

Because there are no spaces in Chinese writing, we cannot group two Chinese characters into a unit.  In other words, we cannot combine two Chinese characters into a compound word. Consequently, all Chinese words are a single Chinese character. Two or more Chinese characters are a phrase.

It will probably come as a shock to most people that two Chinese characters are a phrase. There is a widespread misconception that two Chinese characters are a word. Many Sinologists, and even some linguists, regard two characters as a word. This is self-contradictory.

Why did some Sinologists regard two characters as a word? The reason is that there are many cases of the meaning of a Chinese phrase equal to the meaning of an English word.

Typical examples are 桌子 table, 飞机 airplane, 朋友 friend, 汽车 car, 蝴蝶 butterfly, 凤凰 phoenix, and so on. Two Chinese characters are equal to one English word.

However, we shall not conclude Chinese phrases are Chinese words because the translations of these Chinese phrases are English words. Two Chinese characters are two units while a word is one unit. It is obvious that they conflate or confuse the linguistic terms “word” and “phrase”.

 Look at other examples, such as, 姓 family name, 兄 elder brother, 舅 uncle on my mother’s side, 嫁 a women got married to a man, and so on. This time one Chinese character is equal to many English words.

Could I say English phrases are Chinese characters? No, I definitely could not. The study of the forms of words is called morphology that is the study of the forms of words, not the meanings of the words.

Overall, all Chinese words are a single Chinese character. Two or more Chinese characters are a phrase. There is no compound word in Chinese.