Chinese morphology (1)
What is a Chinese
word? -- One Chinese
character or two Chinese (multiple) characters?
You may have been very well familiar with Chinese language. However, I'm afraid that you probably don't know what a Chinese word is even you are a reputable linguist. Everyone knows what a word is in English. It is formed by a letter or multiple letters separated by spaces or punctuation marks in a sentence. Therefore, even though you don't speak English, you can easily recognize an English word as a single composition of letter(s) in between spaces. A word, also known as the smallest unit, is the basic part in a sentence. Other than punctuation marks, a sentence is built by one or multiple words.
In China, everyone knows that a Chinese sentence is formed by one or Chinese characters. To put it in another way, characters are the smallest units for a Chinese sentence. Hence, a Chinese character functions exactly as a word in a Chinese sentence. From the above logic then, I have concluded that two or multiple characters should not have been regarded as a "word". Instead, "phrase" is perhaps a much more appropriate identity in this case. Nevertheless, over the years, linguists along with Sinologists have been labeling "two Chinese characters" as a "word".
If you are one of them and insist this is a fact, I assume you're also saying that a Chinese character is not a word. Then, what on earth is a Chinese character? From a linguistic perspective, a word is the smallest unit in a sentence. According to this, both a character and a letter in a sentence shall be called a "word". For instance, when letter "I" and "a" appears in an English sentence, they are "words" instead of "letters". The same argument should be applied to a Chinese sentence, where a character functions as a "word" as opposed to a "character". Therefore, I confidently believe that the habitual identification of two Chinese characters as a "word" doesn't make sense, that it is a mistake in fact.
Such erroneous view may have been caused by the numerous existence of meaningful phrases that are shaped by "double characters" in Chinese, as "have to" in English. Whereas "have to" means the same as "must", it is evidently a "two-word" phrase, instead of a single word. Further, linguistically speaking, morphology is the study of the forms of words, not the meanings of words. In the case of English, we can tell the form of a word by the spaces which separate either one or multiple letters. For Chinese, a character is structured by one or multiple strokes in a square shape.
Thus, if you accept that a Chinese character forms a word, then two characters should be regarded as a phrase. Otherwise, if you still believe two characters make a Chinese word, then you must deny that a Chinese character can be a word. If you regard both one and two Chinese characters as a word, it is a self-contradiction. In addition, because of word's property being a unit in writing, computer is capable of word-count while it is lame in terms of counting phrases. As a matter of fact, because two or multiple characters do not present themselves as a single unit, computers to this day can only count the number of Chinese characters only.
Finally, I'm firmly convinced that a character in a Chinese sentence is a unit, or a word. Therefore, two or multiple characters form a phrase. Space is not used for Chinese scripts in the same way as for English, so Chinese "compound word" simply doesn't exist.
Chinese translation
Chinese morphology (1)
什么是中文word？一个汉字，还是两个（多个）汉字？
可能你已经非常熟悉中文。 但是你不一定知道什么是中文的word，哪怕你是一个著名的语言学家。每个人都知道什么是英文的word。 它是句子里，由空格或者标点符号隔开的，一个字母或多个字母组成。因此即使你不懂英语，你也能很容易看出，空格之间，由字母组成的一个单位。word是句子的基本单位，也叫最小单位。 除了标点符号之外，一个句子由一个或多个word组成。
在中国，大家都知道中文的句子由一个或者多个汉字组成。 也就是说，汉字就是中文句子的最小单位。因此，汉字就是中文句子中的word。根据以上逻辑推理，我得出结论，两个或多个汉字不能被当作一个word。这种情况叫phrase应该更准确。然而多年来，语言学家和汉学家都把“两个汉字”叫做一个word。
如果你和他们一样，坚持（两个汉字是一个word）这个观点，我认为你只能不承认一个汉字是一个word。 那么，一个汉字究竟是什么？从语言学的角度来看，句子里最小的单位是word。 根据这一点，句子里的一个汉字或者一个字母都应该叫做word。例如，当字母“I”和“a”
出现在英语句子中时，它们是word而不是“字母”。同样的道理，中文句子中的一个汉字也是word，而不是character字符。因此，我坚信，习惯性地把两个汉字叫做一个word不能自圆其说，实际上是一个错误。
这种错误的观点可能是因为中文里有很多两个汉字组成代表一个意义的phrase词引起的。就像英文里的have to。虽然have to和must意思差不多，但是，have to是一个（两个word的）phrase，不是一个word。此外，语言学里，morphology是研究word的形式，不是word的意义。 以英文为例，英文word的形式是空格之间的字母组成。中文word的形式是方形当中的笔划组成。
因此，如果你认为一个汉字是一个word，那么两个汉字就是一个phrase。反之，如果你认为两个汉字是一个word，那么你就必须否认一个汉字是一个word。 如果你把一个汉字和两个汉字都看成一个word，这是自相矛盾的。此外，由于word是文字的单位，计算机能够统计word的数量，（phrase不是一个单位）计算机不能统计phrase的数量。
最后，我坚信，中文句子里的一个汉字是一个单位，也就是一个word。 因此，两个或多个汉字就是一个phrase。 中文没有英文里的空格，所以中文没有复合word。
