On Monday, 30 April 2018 at 16:20:38 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
As a native Chinese speaker, I find contortions of this kind mildly amusing but mostly ridiculous, because this is absolutely NOT how the language works. It is carrying an ancient scribal ivory-tower ideal of one syllable per word to ludicrous extremes, an ideal that's mostly unattained, because most so-called monosyllabic "words" in the language are in fact multi-consonantal clusters retroactively analysed as monosyllables. Isolated syllables taken out of their context have no real meaning of their own (except perhaps in writing, which again is an invention of the scribes that doesn't fully reflect the spoken reality [*]). Actually pronouncing the atrocity above might as well be speaking reverse-encrypted Klingon as far as comprehensibility by a native speaker is concerned.
Oh yes, I'm well aware that there's a lot of semantic contortion required here, and that as spoken, this sounds like complete gibberish. I don't know where the monosyllable meme came from, either; it's readily apparently from learning even basic vocabulary. 今天, 马上, 故事, hell, 中国 is a compound word.
