20-08-2025, 09:28 AM
Ahem, in many East Asian languages (including Mandarin, Vietnamese,Tibetan, ..), each word is a single syllable; so the average length of a word is somewhere around 4 phonemes, and no word is longer than 8 or so. Syllables generally have a prefix (an initial consonant or consonant cluster), a core (a vowel or vowel cluster), and a suffix (a final consonant or consonant cluster. Each part has a relatively small number of possibilities, and prefix and/or suffix may be empty (missing).
Ordinary Mandarin texts like newspapers use only 4000-5000 word types, and that is what students are supposed to be able to read and write at the end of high school.
Yet that is sufficient to express anything that can be expressed in English or any other human language. Those monosyllabic languages manage to do that by avoiding the Indo-European "caste system" of separate nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs (which require four word types for the same general concept, like "acqua", "acquoso", "acquosamente", "inacquare"), and by generous use of compound words like 電壓 = diàn yā = "lightning" + "press" = "electricity pressure" = voltage
All the best, --jorge
Ordinary Mandarin texts like newspapers use only 4000-5000 word types, and that is what students are supposed to be able to read and write at the end of high school.
Yet that is sufficient to express anything that can be expressed in English or any other human language. Those monosyllabic languages manage to do that by avoiding the Indo-European "caste system" of separate nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs (which require four word types for the same general concept, like "acqua", "acquoso", "acquosamente", "inacquare"), and by generous use of compound words like 電壓 = diàn yā = "lightning" + "press" = "electricity pressure" = voltage
All the best, --jorge