Words Frequency Research Of The Shuihudi Qin Bamboo Slips

In December,1975, a large number of bamboo slips were unearthed in No.11Qin cemetery, Shuihudi, Yunmeng county, Xiaogan area of Hubei province, which are the well-known Shuihudi Qin Bomb Bamboo Slips (often were short for The Shuihudi Qin Bamboo Slips). This is the first time that the Qin Bamboo Slips were found in China. They mainly related to the legal institutions, administrative document, medical works and some divinatory books about good or ill luck of Qin Dynasty, which provided detailed information for the research on the phylogeny of the politics, law, economy, culture and medicine of Qin Dynasty. So they owned great academic value.Comprehensive statistics showed, The Shuihudi Qin Bamboo Slips added up to1155slips (not including another80fragmentary slips). With the Li Calligraphy of,Qin as its characters, it were classified into10parts, including Chronologies, Yu Book, The18Qin Law, Effect of law, Extract of Qin Law, The question and answer of The Law, Fengzhen Type, The Principle To Be An Official, Book Ri A and Book Ri B.The Shuihudi Qin Bamboo Slips totaled1821characters, including1808individual characters,12incorporative characters and1character with2kinds of pronunciation. The particular word-using situation like Interchangeable words, ancient words, modern words and corruption words were far more than that in the contemporaneous extant literature, and lots of it were not found in the extant literature.The individual characters in The Shuihudi Qin Bamboo Slips includes84high-frequency words,457middle-frequency words,and1270low-frequency words.The high-frequency words mainly show on the aspects of the name and description of things, actions and behaviors, numbers and function words,and a few indicating character and coreference; characters indicating unit show on the middle-frequency words, and though the number increasing,there generally is a lack of the characters indicating character and coreference in the middle-frequency words; the low-frequency words contain535one-used characters.Besides the content of the literature, the reason lies in part of the uncommon characters、unknown characters and misused characters.There are538high-frequency words and middle-frequency words in The Shuihudi Qin Bamboo Slips.Ingoring the influence of the content of the literature, we should regard them as common characters in The Shuihudi Qin Bamboo Slips.Compared with the3500common characters in moderm Chinese,465characters are listed in it,and73characters are not. Besides the content of the literature, the reason lies in the some of the common characters in ancient Chinese are never being used or replaced by the other characters.The extinction of the characters totally caused by the extinction of the objective things merely happens.That indicats the usage of characters from The Shuihudi Qin Bamboo Slips to moderm Chinese is quite stable with a few replacement between the ancient and moderm characters.