Chinese Evolution in Recent 150 Years: A Diachronic Study of Word Frequency in The Gospel of Mark
Cong Zhang, Haitao Liu · Journal of Chinese linguistics · 2019
This study quantitatively investigated word frequencies in parallel Chinese texts at three different periods, namely, Classical Chinese (1855), Beijing Mandarin (1908) and Modern Mandarin (2010), attempting to shed some light on the evolution of the Chinese language over the last 150 years. With the evolution of Chinese: both the types and tokens increased diachronically, and sharp changes can be found in the high-frequency function words, vocabulary richness, and the distribution of word classes. The syntactic structure has also become increasingly complex. In addition, although the length of words (measured in character) has increased diachronically, disyllabic words have not always been preponderant in Chinese after the opium war of 1840–1842. The results show that the complication is a crucial trend in the evolution process of Chinese.