The 'Letter' Distribution in the Chinese Language

TL;DR

This study investigates the statistical distribution of Chinese written language elements and compares them with alphabetic languages, revealing consistent distribution patterns across different historical periods and language types.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Chinese's constructive parts follow similar statistical laws as alphabetic languages, extending understanding of language universals.

Findings

Chinese constructive parts share distribution patterns with alphabetic languages

Distribution form remains consistent across Chinese historical periods

Basic particles' usage intensity varies over time

Abstract

Corpus-based statistical analysis plays a significant role in linguistic research, and ample evidence has shown that different languages exhibit some common laws. Studies have found that letters in some alphabetic writing languages have strikingly similar statistical usage frequency distributions. Does this hold for Chinese, which employs ideogram writing? We obtained letter frequency data of some alphabetic writing languages and found the common law of the letter distributions. In addition, we collected Chinese literature corpora for different historical periods from the Tang Dynasty to the present, and we dismantled the Chinese written language into three kinds of basic particles: characters, strokes and constructive parts. The results of the statistical analysis showed that, in different historical periods, the intensity of the use of basic particles in Chinese writing varied, but the form of the distribution was consistent. In particular, the distributions of the Chinese constructive parts are certainly consistent with those alphabetic writing languages. This study provides new evidence of the consistency of human languages.