The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

BTW, I'm not sure what method was used to determine the number of words for the Chinese manuscript.

I fed the Chinese text of the webpage you posted to Google Translate, and copy-pasted the pinyin that it provided (at the bottom of the left pane).

Two-word compounds are not explicitly marked in the Chinese script; each syllable is a separate character, and the spaces between characters are all the same.   In pinyin transcriptions, some pairs of syllables are written as a single word. I don't know what the rule is and how rigid it is.  Does anyone here know? Answered by pervious post...

Most entries in Chinese and Chinese-Xxx dictionaries are two-syllable compounds where the meanings of the individual syllables have only vague relation to that of the compound, like English "pineapple", "necktie", or "typewriter".  But there may be a gradation in that regard; I suppose that in English one could write either "back-scatter" "backscatter" or "back scatter" without upsetting the reader, and the same perhaps happens when one writes Chinese in pinyin (which I suppose is something that the Chinese themselves very rarely do).

So perhaps the pair joining in pinyin is defined by some standard dictionary.  But my guess is that Google Translate just gets that info from crunching a big pile of random pinyin texts, and therefore is random to some extent.