Well, sometimes individual letters are semantically meaningful, like the “s” at the end of a plural. But “partially determined” is the wrong criterion. The phrase for “phone” may mean “speech tool”, but to understand it, you have to memorize the meaning of “speech tool” separately from memorizing the meanings of “speech” and “tool”. The fact that it isn’t written as a single word that amounts to “speechtool”, is an irrelevant matter of syntax that doesn’t fundamentally change how the language works.
In English, if we wrote “telephone” as “tele phone”, and “microphone” as “micro phone”, etc., that would by your standard reduce the word count. But the change in word count would mean basically nothing.
Well, sometimes individual letters are semantically meaningful, like the “s” at the end of a plural. But “partially determined” is the wrong criterion. The phrase for “phone” may mean “speech tool”, but to understand it, you have to memorize the meaning of “speech tool” separately from memorizing the meanings of “speech” and “tool”. The fact that it isn’t written as a single word that amounts to “speechtool”, is an irrelevant matter of syntax that doesn’t fundamentally change how the language works.
In English, if we wrote “telephone” as “tele phone”, and “microphone” as “micro phone”, etc., that would by your standard reduce the word count. But the change in word count would mean basically nothing.