> I think there was an attempt by early humans to make words have as less syllables as possible to simplify communication
There doesn't seem to be any common-accepted definition of what a word is, especially across difference languages. See
Martin Haspelmath's 2010 paper at www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/WordSegmentation2010.pdf His abstract:
'''The general distinction between morphology and syntax is widely taken for granted, but it crucially depends on the notion of a cross-linguistically valid concept of "(morphosyntactic) word". I show that there are no good criteria for defining such a concept. I examine ten criteria in some detail (potential pauses, free occurrence, mobility, uninterruptibility, non-selectivity, non-coordinatability, anaphoric islandhood, nonextractability, morphophonological isiosyncrasies, and deviations from biuniqueness), and I show that none of them is necessary and sufficient on its own, and no combination of them gives a definition of "word" that accords with linguists' orthographic practice. "Word" can be defined as a language-specific concept, but this is not relevant to the general question pursued here. "Word" can be defined as a fuzzy concept, but this is theoretically meaningful if the continuum between affixes and words, or words and phrases, shows some clustering, for which there is no systematic evidence at present. Thus, I conclude that we do not currently have a good basis for dividing the domain of morphosyntax into "morphology" and "syntax", and that linguists should be very careful with cross-linguistic claims that make crucial reference to a cross-linguistic "word" notion.'''
My theory is as long as it contains meaning then that would be considered a "word", the number of syllables is irrelevant. I could arguably say that a word is an "irreducible unit of information" in the human language. For inflectional languages we can reduce the word by taking out prefixes ans suffixes and the root word will still have meaning. But the meaning changes as well so in essence it becomes a completely different word albeit somewhat related.
There doesn't seem to be any common-accepted definition of what a word is, especially across difference languages. See Martin Haspelmath's 2010 paper at www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/staff/haspelmath/pdf/WordSegmentation2010.pdf His abstract:
'''The general distinction between morphology and syntax is widely taken for granted, but it crucially depends on the notion of a cross-linguistically valid concept of "(morphosyntactic) word". I show that there are no good criteria for defining such a concept. I examine ten criteria in some detail (potential pauses, free occurrence, mobility, uninterruptibility, non-selectivity, non-coordinatability, anaphoric islandhood, nonextractability, morphophonological isiosyncrasies, and deviations from biuniqueness), and I show that none of them is necessary and sufficient on its own, and no combination of them gives a definition of "word" that accords with linguists' orthographic practice. "Word" can be defined as a language-specific concept, but this is not relevant to the general question pursued here. "Word" can be defined as a fuzzy concept, but this is theoretically meaningful if the continuum between affixes and words, or words and phrases, shows some clustering, for which there is no systematic evidence at present. Thus, I conclude that we do not currently have a good basis for dividing the domain of morphosyntax into "morphology" and "syntax", and that linguists should be very careful with cross-linguistic claims that make crucial reference to a cross-linguistic "word" notion.'''