Chinese
In terms of pronunciation, Chinese characters (Mandarin) are strictly monosyllabic. As such, words are limited to a length of five phonemes. In Romanized spelling, no more than six letters are needed for any single Chinese character in standard pronunciation, with the exception of 双, (shuāng, "double").
Individual characters are not direct equivalents of words in the English sense, as many Chinese "words" require more than one character to express, one being 葡萄 (pútáo, "grapes").
Chinese characters are made up of a number of distinct pen or brush strokes. The number of strokes in any given word is a constant, and thus counting the number of strokes required for a word could be used as a measure of the word's length. According to Joël Bellassen (1989), the most complex Chinese character is zhé listen, meaning "verbose" and containing sixty-four strokes; this character fell from use around the 5th century.
Read more about this topic: Longest Words
Famous quotes containing the word chinese:
“We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)