disyllabic

Most Mandarin words are disyllabic or longer, and 400×400 = 160k is enough combinations for a quite large vocabulary.

Stress placement on disyllabic words works at a grammatical level, not just a phonetic one.

That two-syllable pronunciation initially struck me as wrong too, but it turns out: > The disyllabic pronunciation \ˈfō-lij\ is very common.

You're technically right, but the comparison isn't completely far fetched considering: * Chinese surnames are monosyllabic, and given names are disyllabic.

Of the disyllabic pronunciations, only #9 had a marked regional accent.

>Most Mandarin words are disyllabic or longer, and 400×400 = 160k is enough combinations for a quite large vocabulary.

That is, in many cases, the syllables of disyllabic Mandarin words are no longer synchronically analysable as morphemes, though at one point in the past it was possible to analyse them in this way.

>> The disyllabic pronunciation \ˈfō-lij\ is very common.

Incidentally I have a harder time picking up new terms in Mandarin by ear where many characters that are distinct in Cantonese sound the same; and it's widely agreed that Mandarin Chinese has evolved more disyllabic words to compensate.

[]ah ck təss / []ah ck tiss => ignoring the first consonant (cluster) which anchors the rhyme and pronouncing the u as a schwa (which it is), the ck's are the same and təss and tiss are totes similar – disyllabic rhyme skeleton / gelatin?

However, the key player here is not laumars, but his friend Carol:-) I mean, the interesting part is that she heard her name because the epenthesis process transformed a monosyllabic word into disyllabic one, and that changed the shape of the word: kar(uh)l has the same rhythm as carol, and small vowel quality differences are probably less important that the rhythm when the word gets parsed by the brain.

The most serious problem is that it treats single characters as "words", despite the fact that the vast majority of modern Chinese is disyllabic.

If you're still unconvinced, the second paragraph on the Wikipedia page for Vietnamese directly addresses this: "Although it is often mistakenly thought as being an monosyllabic language, Vietnamese words typically consist of from one to many as ten morphemes or syllables; the majority of Vietnamese vocabulary are disyllabic and trisyllabic words."

Disyllabic words on the other hand can have any combination of stresses (iamb, trochee, spondee, or pyrrhic), but only if they're foot-aligned.