Do the compound signs (two or more simple signs written inside or beside one another) carry meanings beyond their components, and do they behave like one sign or two in the statistics?
No evidence yetNothing has been tested yet. Propose an answer, or add evidence.
Where it stands
No answers have been proposed yet.
Why it matters
CDLI lists about 640 compound signs, written as |AxB| in ATF. Born and Kelley count the corpus under four conventions, with compounds split or kept, and the choice changes the token total from about 53,000 to about 56,500[1]. Damerow's example of a compound that later meant "to eat" but in the archaic texts marked ration disbursement shows that compounds can have institutional meanings of their own[2].