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I read once ([in this comment by Victor Mair on Language
Log](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4129#comment-233536)) that
Chinese has single morphemes that span two hanzi. The example given was the
Chinese word pútáo 葡萄. At the time, I assumed it applied to Japanese equally,
because I assumed 葡萄{ぶどう} was the same word. I then assumed I could generalize
from that to similar compounds. (In retrospect, I don't think that reasoning
was very good, which is why I'm asking this question.)

Other compounds that look like they might be monomorphemic include [薔薇]{ばら},
[蜘蛛]{くも}, and 麒麟{きりん}.

Are any of these single morphemes? Pairs of bound morphemes? If these are bad
examples, are there two-kanji compounds that _are_ single morphemes?
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kanji compounds linguistics
Does Japanese have morphemes that span two kanji?
The only place you would find morphemes that span multiple kanji are in gikun
or in reformed words, simply because "morpheme" in Japanese is defined as the
sound a single kanji or kana has/makes.

> 「[海鷂魚]{えい}」
>
> 「[今]{け}[日]{ふ}」 -> 「[今日]{きょう}」
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Chinese is a lot neater with regard to its characters; one character equals
one word (now morpheme) equals one syllable. In theory at least. 葡萄 being a
two syllable morpheme, Chinese would rather adhere to a policy of one
character per syllable than one per morpheme if it has to choose. In ancient
Chinese there were prefixes and suffixes as well, but they could be added
without changing the number of syllables, so one character per syllable held
true. All of your examples look like borrowed words where this happened.
Japanese is a bit messier. Niwatori is evidently 庭＋鳥、but since in Chinese
"chicken" is just one word, Japanese follow suite and uses 鶏. I know there are
cases of the opposite, where the word has more kanji than morphemes, or even
syllables sometimes, but my Japanese isn't great, so I wouldn't be able to
give any examples. Someone mentioned 百舌鳥.
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answer