Since most words in Chinese are compound words, are individual characters mainly morphemes? For example, the character ‘beautiful’ (美) in ‘America’ (美國) vs the adjective ‘beautiful’ (漂亮)

I am a linguist and I disagree with this statement. Yes, the term "morpheme" has mostly been used for inflected languages and Linguistic terms have been heavily influenced by romance languages. However, I think you are misrepresenting what "morpheme" means, especially in its present usage.

Definitionally, Chinese does have morphemes. Each syllable is a morpheme. There are free and bound morphemes. Morphemes are combined to make words. Some morphemes are words even when they stand alone (free morphemes). Not all morphemes are words.

You are correct in saying Chinese is NOT inflectional, unlike English and other European languages. However, words in Chinese CAN be formed through affixing, even though compounding is much more common.

/r/ChineseLanguage Thread Parent