Simplification Is Not Dominant in the Evolution of Chinese Characters

Abstract

Linguistic systems are hypothesised to be shaped by pressures towards communicative efficiency that drive processes of simplification. A longstanding illustration of this idea is the claim that Chinese characters have progressively simplified over time. Here we test this claim by analyzing a dataset with more than a million images of Chinese characters spanning more than 3,000 years of recorded history. We find no consistent evidence of simplification through time, and contrary to popular belief we find that modern Chinese characters are higher in visual complexity than their earliest known counterparts. One plausible explanation for our findings is that simplicity trades off with distinctiveness, and that characters have become less simple because of pressures towards distinctiveness. Our findings are therefore compatible with functional accounts of language but highlight the diverse and sometimes counterintuitive ways in which linguistic systems are shaped by pressures for communicative efficiency.

A Tale of Two Scripts: Applying The Principle of Least Complexity to Simplified and Traditional Chinese

“…For example, if one character has a PC score of 19.8 while another has a score of 20.1, rounding these scores will make their complexity equivalent even though they are not exactly equivalent. Second, both complexity scores seem to be highly correlated, with a Pearson correlation of r = .80 (Koshevoy et al, 2023), which mirrors previous comparisons of complexity measures for Chinese (Han et al, 2022). Therefore, we found this to be redundant and not necessary for our purposes.…”

“…Another study looked at the relationship between frequency and complexity across characters in five scripts in Chinese history (oracle bone, bronze, small seal, traditional, and simplified scripts; Han et al, 2022). It was shown that frequency had a consistently negative but curvilinear association with complexity.…”

“…It was shown that frequency had a consistently negative but curvilinear association with complexity. However, this analysis also did not directly answer the questions we had, as frequencies were binned into five groups and plotted against complexity across the five scripts without showing their raw or logged associations across the entire distribution (see Figure 4 in Han et al, 2022). Additionally, this analysis used the same frequency data for all of the involved scripts, which means that only complexity was allowed to vary between scripts in their models.…”

“…Many features of Chinese scripts are somewhat random. Han et al (2022) showed that a curvilinear relationship exists between complexity and the time of origin of five different scripts in Chinese history, indicating that Chinese did not uniformly evolve over time. It is also known that simplified Chinese is missing many radicals once present in traditional.…”

Time Evolution of the Symmetry of Alphabet Symbols and Its Quantification: Study in the Archeology of Symmetry

“…In other words, a more accurate wording, which is adequate for describing the time evolution of alphabets, is "compression" and not "simplification" [10]. This idea was exemplified recently by analysis of Chinese characters spanning more than 3000 years of recorded history [12]. No consistent evidence of simplification through time was revealed [11].…”