Word expressly. Mandarin Chinese is a very analytic language (with few inflectional affixes), making it unnecessary to delimit words orthographically. However, there are many multiple-morpheme compounds in Mandarin, as well as a variety of bound morphemes that make it difficult to clearly determine what constitutes a word. Sometimes, languages which are extremely close grammatically will consider the same order of words in different ways. For example, reflexive verbs in the French infinitive are separate from their respective particle, e.g. "se laver" ("to wash oneself"), whereas in Portuguese they are hyphenated, e.g. "lavar-se", and in Spanish they are joined, e.g. "lavarse". Japanese
Three letter rule and "ka". Carney calls such words "exceptions which prove the rule, clearly marked as exotic by the spelling". Three letter rule In English spelling, the three letter rule (or short word rule) is the observation that one- and two-letter words tend to be function words such as "I", "at", "he", "if", "of", "or", etc. As a consequence of the rule, "content words" tend to have at least three letters. In particular, content words containing fewer than three phonemes may be augmented with letters which are phonetically redundant, such as "ebb, "add, "egg, "inn, "bee, "awe, "buy", "owe", etc. Many content