I don't quite understand what you mean. In modern standard mandarin it is pretty much one character = one syllable. They'd have to travel 3000 years back in time to recover the lost syllables.
My point is that written Chinese is much terser than spoken Chinese (particularly classical Chinese, of course) and that this is enabled by the disambiguation inherent in the characters. That is, where in spoken language you'd use a two-character word, when writing it would be sufficient to write just one character to evoke what's meant.
Now, if you were to write in some sort of alphabetical script, you'd just write the full two-syllable word.
My point is that written Chinese is much terser than spoken Chinese (particularly classical Chinese, of course) and that this is enabled by the disambiguation inherent in the characters. That is, where in spoken language you'd use a two-character word, when writing it would be sufficient to write just one character to evoke what's meant.
Now, if you were to write in some sort of alphabetical script, you'd just write the full two-syllable word.