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It appears Chinese has about 400 syllables (1600 if you include tones):

Many Chinese words (as pointed out in the first link) are composed of two words, which can't be isolated, like butterfly 蝴蝶 (hudie), but others can be decomposed like hippo 河马 (hémǎ) "river horse". This leads me to believe that many words in Chinese can be decomposed into individual characters, but also many words cannot be decomposed, the parts don't explicitly combine into the whole, the whole's meaning is unrelated to the parts, though I'm not sure.

What other languages are like this? That is, languages which have just a handful of base words/symbols (like roughly less than 2000), and which combine these to form more complex things like "river horse", or unrelated things like "butterfly"? Is Vietnamese like this? What are the key languages with this feature, with perhaps an example to demonstrate?

Lance
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    Are you asking about syllables or about characters? Plenty of languages have syllable inventories less than or equal to this size: Oh (2015) lists 643 for Japanese, 1,104 for Korean, and 2,082 for Basque. But that has nothing to do with how they're written, or how they form words. – Draconis Mar 13 '23 at 04:02
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    Oh also lists 1,274 syllables in Mandarin, based on looking at the 20k most frequent lemmata in a corpus. – Draconis Mar 13 '23 at 04:03
  • I'm mainly asking about how like in Chinese the characters map to 1 syllable which map to one word, and then they are combined. Not the syllable inventories of other languages. Not necessarily characters either. But basically they have a small set of standard words (which ideally are one syllable each, but not totally necessary), which they combine into larger words and concepts. I want to call it "combining atoms into molecules". Whereas affixes don't fit the bill. – Lance Mar 13 '23 at 04:03
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    Are you referring to a limited number of monosyllabic morphemes? – James Grossmann Mar 13 '23 at 04:04
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    Chinese characters don't map cleanly to syllables: there are 149 different characters that are all pronounced yì. – Draconis Mar 13 '23 at 04:05
  • If your question is "can there be a language with a small, bounded set of morphemes that all other words are derived from", I recommend asking it again, as a new question. Morphemes are different from syllables and characters. – Draconis Mar 13 '23 at 16:36

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All languages are built from a limited set of syllables, more specifically, no language allows an unbounded set of phonemes in a single syllable. To that we can add the fact that words of languages are built of some number of syllables. I don't think there is anything particularly striking about Mandarin in terms of syllables and words, except that compared to English, there are vastly more monosyllabic words. It would be interesting to know whether the set of extant monosyllabic words in Mandarin is coextensive with the set of extant syllables – this is not the case in English, for example [θɪm] is not a word but it is a syllable (thimble).

That's the best I can suggest – I don't understand your used of "symbol, word, syllable" in the question.

user6726
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