The Romance Of The Three Kingdoms Word Frequency Is Studied

The Romance of Three Kingdoms is the first Chinese classical novel, which covers a wholecentury. It took more than a thousand years to complete this book. This book is a great historicalnovel which was developed by more than one writers rather than by only one author, so it is abook representative of collective wisdom of Chinese. Classical Chinese and some oral Chinesewere both used in this book, which takes readers to a historical picture. Therefore, this book hadseriousness for describing history which made it be of historians’ spirit and style.Yong Yuzi in Ming Dynasty had pointed that the language of the Romance of ThreeKingdom was neither pedantic nor being folk language. Because it had undergone the processesof historical writing, story-telling scripts to liberators’ composition. Story-telling scripts made itslanguages more close to oral language, while story-telling style provide foundation of languageconcise. Massive nascent lexical and syntactic phenomenon after Han and Wei dynasties werereflected in this book. As biographically historic literature, the language of the Romance of ThreeKingdoms is also concise with some classical Chinese for creating a historical atmosphere. Thus,It is evident that "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" provided the representative materials in thestudy of language, but few researches have focused on its language form and language researchin the point of view of character frequency.Based on comprehensive study of literatures in more than100years, we found that thelanguage study on Romance of the Three Kingdoms has the following limitations. First, from thestatistical analysis of relevant literatures, many studies on this book focused on language artsrather than philology. Secondly, linguistic researches on this book is neither systematic norcomplete in theory. Some systematic studies lack depth and integrity. Thirdly, most researches onlanguage arts or linguistics of it are descriptive or exemplificative researches, while few closed,or statistical analysis were found. In our future studies, we should overcome these limitations toachieve progress and achievement in the study of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which isclassical book of great Corpus Value.This study is designed to comprehensively analyze Chinese character use in this book usingsentence database and digital information form sequence database. With the help of the digitalinformation, based on Chinese character as measuring unit, it is very convenient to quantify andthoroughly analyze character use in Romance of Three Kingdom. Based on the analysis,language studies in may aspects on this may be conducted and conclusions which can not beobtained from sample studies can be drawn. The qualitative analysis on the basis of quantitative research is the focus of the researchwork. The purpose of this project is to study the use of Chinese characters in Romance of theThree Kingdoms by calculating all characters used in this book. Accurate overall number ofChinese Characters and number of number of Characters are the prerequisites for quantitativelanguage study. Based on extracted character table from the corpus of Romance of the ThreeKingdoms, and we used each character as a separate unit of account. We counted total number ofcharacters and each character frequency in this book, which are of great significance for thequantitative language study. To establish Character frequency table in Romance of ThreeKingdom,7kinds of data including order number, number for abbreviation, frequency(absolutefrequency), character coverage (relative frequency), accumulative number of characters(cumulative frequency), the cumulative coverage, and average frequency ratio.For character frequency study in "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", the specific andinnovative methodologies in this study includes:(1)Statistical method was systematically used inthis study. We calculated the frequency of every character and character use in this book forquantitative analysis and qualitative analysis.(2)Both synchronic study and diachronic studywere used in this project. We did synchronic comparison on the word frequency, by comparingRomance of the Three Kingdoms with the Water Margin and Scholars Biography. Diachronicstudy on the word frequency was also conducted to compare Romance of the Three Kingdomswith Three Kingdoms, and to compare Characters in with notational character frequency table.(3)Microscopic analysis and the macroscopic analysis, both which are necessary in languagestudy, were combined in this study. Based on full microscopic analysis, we devoted to the studyof extremely high frequency characters to get an overall outlines and a macroscopicgeneralization. This was helpful for the systematic and relevant discussion.(4)Traditionalmethodologies and Western theories were combined in this study. We mainly used the traditionalway of Chinese characters and did some optimization to categorize character frequencies. But weintroduced the concept of "core" words to study the characters of very high frequency to studyCharacter frequency in Romance of Three Kingdoms on international level.(5)We paid attentionnot only to the character list analysis but also to comparison and verification at application level.In this regard, we compared character frequency in Romance of the Three Kingdoms with thosein Chinese text books and national Character frequency list. By doing this, the popularity ofRomance of Three Kingdoms can be demonstrated, and advantages and disadvantages of thesefrequency lists can be verified.(6)Texts for Romance of the Three Kingdoms were collated.Language research requires authentic and reliable literature materials. For the "Romance of theThree Kingdoms" text, the abundant legacy in exegetics, emendation study and literature makethe romance of the Three Kingdoms text almost perfect, and can not be ignored in our research.In addition, we systematically summarized these achievements to build a professionaland comprehensive platform. To build this platform, the key and essential task is to establish asatisfactory and objective electronic copy of this book based on a selected paper copy. In thisproject, we also specially developed an emendation in a chapter to discuss discussed thenormalization for simplified Chinese characters in Romance of the Three Kingdoms.There are12chapters in this paper: Chapter1focuses on discussion of the author ofRomance of the Three Kingdoms, and the development of this book to get a historicalbackground for corpus. Chapter2is the emendation to the master copy of corpus, which canensure the reliability, is helpful to find and solve issues related to characters used in typographycopy. In Chapter3, the values of corpus and the significance of frequency study were discussed.In chapter4and5, categorization of character frequency was studied, and relevant verificationswere made. From Chapter6to chapter10,core Characters, characters of high frequency,characters of medium frequency, characters of low frequency, and characters of single use inRomance of Three Kingdoms were respectively studied. In Chapter11, based on categorizationof frequency, specific examples were given for character frequency studies in Romance of ThreeKingdoms. A character frequency table were developed based on our calculation and statisticalanalysis. For the authors’ convenience, this table is provided in Chapter12,the last Chapter ofthis paper. Language study references regarding Romance of Three Kingdoms for more than ahundred years were provided as an appendix.We have made many conclusions based on this project, and some of these conclusions needto be further study. The following are conclusions which are of much more cognisance or needfurther study.First, based on studies by Su Peicheng, Feng Zhiwei and other researchers, the definition ofcharacter frequency was further normalized as Chinese character frequency, which is a ratio oftimes of specific character relative to the overall times of all characters used in a specific context.The formula for calculation of this frequency is f=n/N*100%, where f is frequency, n is thetimes used for a specific character, and N the overall times used for all Characters.Secondly, by comparing character frequency in Romance of Three Kingdoms withCharacter list in modern language and character list in Compulsory Education New Curriculum,we further demonstrated the conclusion that language of the Romance of Three Kingdom wasnot pedantic, which have been published in recent volume of Guangming Daily as one of myseries of studies.Thirdly, character frequency list and many national character lists can be verified each other,which demonstrated the scientificalness and applicability.Fourthly, from the perspective of character frequency, it can be demonstrated that Chinese citizens with primary education or non-native Chinese learners with HSK level can understandRomance of Three Kingdoms.The character frequency study on Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a systematic studyrelated to the ancient literature, philology, applied linguistics and statistics. So there must bemany aspect in this study which need further improvements or modification. We will continue tostudy in this area, and also look forward to guidance from more friends.