A Study on the Diachronic Evolution of Ancient Chinese Vocabulary Based on a Large-Scale Rough Annotated Corpus

A Study on the Diachronic Evolution of Ancient Chinese Vocabulary Based on a Large-Scale Rough Annotated Corpus

This paper makes a quantitative analysis of the diachronic evolution of ancient Chinese vocabulary by constructing and counting a large-scale rough annotated corpus. The texts from Si Ku Quan Shu (a collection of Chinese ancient books) are automatically segmented to obtain ancient Chinese vocabulary with time information, which is used to the statistics on word frequency, standardized type/token ratio and proportion of monosyllabic words and dissyllabic words. Through data analysis, this study has the following four findings. Firstly, the high-frequency words in ancient Chinese are stable to a certain extent. Secondly, there is no obvious dissyllabic trend in ancient Chinese vocabulary. Moreover, the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589 AD) and Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368 AD) are probably the two periods with the most abundant vocabulary in ancient Chinese. Finally, the unique words with high frequency in each dynasty are mainly official titles with real power. These findings break away from qualitative methods used in traditional researches on Chinese language history and instead uses quantitative methods to draw macroscopic conclusions from large-scale corpus.