How Does Word Length Evolve in Written Chinese?
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 26384237.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0138567 and PMC identifier 4575206.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
We demonstrate a substantial evidence that the word length can be an essential lexical structural feature for word evolution in written Chinese. The data used in this study are diachronic Chinese short narrative texts with a time span of over 2000-years. We show that the increase of word length is an essential regularity in word evolution. On the one hand, word frequency is found to depend on word length, and their relation is in line with the Power law function y = ax-b. On the other hand, our deeper analyses show that the increase of word length results in the simplification in characters for balance in written Chinese. Moreover, the correspondence between written and spoken Chinese is discussed. We conclude that the disyllabic trend may account for the increase of word length, and its impacts can be explained in "the principle of least effort".
Medical subject headings
- Language
- Speech Perception
- Writing