I'm a Chinese. According to my knowledge, most modern compound words are directly taken from Japanese (since we share lots of characters), who borrowed those words from classical Chinese. Many words like 选举 政治 数学 etc. are actually from classical Chinese articles.
Another important thing that this article did not mention is that every Chinese character has its own meaning. In classical Chinese, characters are treated like words. However, since there is only very limited space to put things into one character, Chinese quickly turned to using compound words.
Here is my theory: In ancient Chinese, strokes are like characters in English, and characters are like words. However, because we limited ourselves to write each character into a square space, we quickly run out of space for single characters --- like in English, no one likes long words. To solve this problem, Chinese used those meaningful characters to construct compound words. This practice is actually common in English esp. in tech world --- words like TCP/IP, PC, BSD, etc. are kind of compound words to me.
That sounds about right. We abbreviate whatever we can if ideas become awkward.
For example, in the US military, there are a lot of concepts that are clumsy to say - for example, it's pretty silly to refer to the Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization Program seventy times when you're talking about why you need to change a safety protocol, so you just refer to it as the NATOPS. All of these concepts get abbreviated - Physical Fitness Test becomes PFT, Non-Judicial Punishment becomes NJP, Then people turn these into verbs, (Bill got NJP'd yesterday) and those get abbreviated as well, and pretty soon you end up with a totally new language that no one else can understand. I told this story to my girlfriend without even knowing that I was doing it:
"[Name] got caught pencil-whipping a PM on the radar. Top wanted to fix him with "EMI," but the OIC wanted him to burn, so it went to the CO for NJP. The CO is a pilot, so he maxed him out - took his pay, 45/45, reduction to PFC. Then, the SMaj told him he looked fat, so he got sent over to the S3 to weigh in. He's over, and he didn't tape out, so now he's on BCP, too! He's gonna get adsep'd if he keeps going the way he is."
My girlfriend started laughing at me, told me to repeat it, and laughed again. I realized that I was basically speaking another language, and then quickly realized that a bunch of the things I was talking about were alien to her anyway! This 90-second story became a thirty-minute discussion of what exactly "taping out" is, why Extra Military Instruction is a sarcastic term for "told to weed the desert for twelve hours," and what's so bad about the Body Composition Program. All of these concepts have been put into my brain from years of living with them, and describing them to someone else is often really difficult.
The tech world does the exact same thing. So does medicine, laboratory science, theater, band... We all have our own languages, created by common experiences and a need to communicate them to other people.
Exactly! Imagine to put those military people on an island and let them evolve more than 4000 years, then their vocabulary will be very different from nowadays American English.
Compound words in Chinese is something like that. But the good news is: each character in Chinese has its own meaning. So you can sort of guess what's the meaning of words if you know the meaning(s) of the characters.
However, except those compound words, there are lot of common expressions, which we call them 成语, which uses historical stories, poetries and you may never know what people are talking about if they use such expressions (people use them a lot and it is considered as a sign of higher education if they can use those expressions correctly and frequently.)
Another important thing that this article did not mention is that every Chinese character has its own meaning. In classical Chinese, characters are treated like words. However, since there is only very limited space to put things into one character, Chinese quickly turned to using compound words.
Here is my theory: In ancient Chinese, strokes are like characters in English, and characters are like words. However, because we limited ourselves to write each character into a square space, we quickly run out of space for single characters --- like in English, no one likes long words. To solve this problem, Chinese used those meaningful characters to construct compound words. This practice is actually common in English esp. in tech world --- words like TCP/IP, PC, BSD, etc. are kind of compound words to me.
Edit: typo.