polysyllabic characters

tianfeng
 June 07, 2007, 03:41 AM posted in General Discussion
I was reading a book on the Chinese language the other day and I ran across an example of the mythical (to me at least) polysyllabic character.  The character was prounced shang-xia and was written with the radical as 女 and then the right was 上on top of 下 all as one character. Whenever someone teaching Chinese says that each character is monosyllabic there is always one person out there who points out things like 哪儿 having only one syllable but two character.  There are some that even go as far to say that some characters are polysyllabic.  I have never seen an example until today and I was wondering if there are anymore?  
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bluebluesky
 June 09, 2007, 04:04 AM

Up, I'm also very interested!

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tianfeng
 June 09, 2007, 11:28 AM

I found another one. It is 三点水，加一个里， it is pronounced hai li. from what I read it is the equivalents of the English "knot" which stands for nautical mile. I am not sure if it is used anymore.

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John
 June 12, 2007, 05:51 AM

I once wrote a blog entry on this very topic: Multisyllabic Hanzi?

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tianfeng
 June 12, 2007, 10:56 AM

Thanks John that was an awesome discussion. Just on the Japanese thing I think it is harder to actually go out and speak and understand Japanese the way you learn it from the text. I mean you learn all those particle it is frustrating to get in a conversation and find that people just don't use them in everday speech. Chinese I find what ever you learn starting out can be heard on a regular basis on the street. Just as a side not the character I posted, the 女plus the 上and 下。Mean elevator girl. I am guessing that I could find a pejorative use for that one. It seems like the majority of examples by people were all to do with names of things. I wonder if it has ever been used outside of that context.