Of course. The Chinese number system is base 10 (or, if you scale way up, base 10,000) with a positional writing system.
The symbol for ten is 十. Heck, there's also a symbol for twenty, 廿, and it exists despite the number system being base 10. Anything that has to be written a lot is likely to have a convenient written form.
If you're curious, zero is 零. Successive zeroes are combined, so 一千零一 is 1001. 5147 would be 五千一百四十七. 10, as previously mentioned, is 十.
> Heck, there's also a symbol for twenty, 廿, and it exists despite the number system being base 10.
I'm not sure that if you intend to captured the structure of chinese symbols, you wouldn't to make the radicals something below symbols. Then 廿 wouldn't count as a single symbol here, but rather as a concatenation of two 十, i.e. the same as XX is 20 in roman numerals.
You are wrong about this. The structure of the characters is very explicit; one character per square. Meaning is assigned at that level and never below.
(As a matter of character etymology, you are right that 廿 and its variant form 卄 come from combining two 十. But that can't make it "two symbols".)
Because there is no similarity between those two things. "combine" and "-ing" have meaning independent of each other. (In linguistics this is recognized by calling both of them "morphemes".) This is not true of the graphical components that make up Chinese characters; the bottom level at which any meaning can be assigned is the entire character.
Characters have structural features that can be identified and named. But at that level of the writing system, meaning isn't present.
> This is not true of the graphical components that make up Chinese characters; the bottom level at which any meaning can be assigned is the entire character.
I don't speak Chinese myself, so I'm a bit unsuited for the discussion, but a Chinese friend told me that the characters are composed of base symbols. You can't necessary guess the meaning from that alone and sometimes they changed shape a lot over time, but that is true for other languages as well.
Maybe "-ing" is a less ideal example, because it suitability to be combined depends on word class (verb), and it actually changes the grammar, not the word itself. Maybe a better example is the "com-" in both "combine" and "compose". It does has some meaning on it's one, but what the actual combined word means is not necessarily directly inferable and has changed over time.
That is the positional part. If you were to rearrange it, you'd get something invalid. 二十三百 isn't a number at all.
Recall that the use of zero is necessitated by using positional notation, and that is what we see here: you must explicitly zero any magnitudes you're not using. (At least, any that are below one you are using.)
I should also note that while there is no symbol for the number 10,000 - there is a place value, but the number is 一万, not 万 - the number 10 is still written 十.
