Complexity of Chinese Characters
نویسندگان
چکیده
Chinese characters are logograms each of which corresponds to one or only a few ideas. To express many ideas, many characters have to be used. Thus, in order to distinguish different characters, great complexity of form is necessary. If Chinese characters had evolved so as to maximize efficiency in conveying ideas, character complexity would depend on the necessary number of characters. Therefore we examined the distributions of stroke numbers of Chinese characters taught from the first to sixth grade of Japanese elementary school, Chinese characters for normal daily use, and all the Chinese characters listed in large dictionaries. A fairly linear relationship was found between the logarithm of the number of characters and the average number of strokes in each groups (r = 0.998). This result suggests that the morphology of the Chinese character system is well organized so as to distinguish given number of ideas with minimum complexity.
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