The Quantitative Analysis Of The Addition And The Deletion Of The 5～(TH) Edition Of "Modern Chinese Dictionary"

This thesis is a quantitative analysis about the contrast between the old and new versions of"Modern Chinese Dictionary"-the 4th edition (2002) and the 5th edition (2005). The coverageincludes 1830 pages of the entries in the new version and 1689 pages of the entries in the oldversion, excluding those words that include letters from the Roman alphabet. The contrast targetsthe number of new words and the new meanings added into the new version and the old words andthe old meanings deleted from the old version; also a small number of the new versions of the oldentries.Since there has never been a comprehensive study covering all the differences of all theamounts of the new entries and the old entries, which affect the increases and decreases in thenumbers of the new entries, we extract these data for an elementary analysis. The purpose of thispaper is to provide an effective reference for those who want to examine the new trend of thevocabulary and the development of the language of Chinese.Due to the complicated process involved in the compilation of the two versions, the additionand the deletion of words cannot be generally simplified into two groups. Therefore, we have todesign a code system for the classification of the two groups. There are totally 25 codes suppliedfor the five categories which include 7 codes for the addition of the new words, 5 codes for theaddition of the new meanings, 4 codes for the deletion of the old words, 3 codes for the deletion ofthe old meanings and 6 codes for the new versions of some words. The approach to theclarification of the collective data is to classify and compose them in a database. The statistics ofthe data just show the number of the syllables of the words, the pans of speech of the words andsome sources of the words. We also do the basic analysis of these entries with the reasons ofaddition and deletion of the entries. The result is that there are totally 6274 new entries of the words, 1786 new added meanings tothe old words, in which it includes 880 surnames; 2352 deleted words and 358 deleted meanings.Besides, there are 177 merged entries of the old words, 37 split entries of the old words, 38merged entries of the meaning of the old words and 108 split entries of the old meanings.The conclusion is that the number of added new words is 170ï¼…higher than the number ofdeleted words and the number of added new meanings of the old words is 390ï¼…higher than thedeleted meanings of the old words. In other words, the differences between the addition of thewords and the deletion of the words are smaller than those between the addition of the meaningsand the deletion of the meanings. In addition to that, the number of the merged entries of thewords is 360ï¼…higher than the number of the split entries of the words and the number of the splitmeanings of the old words is 190ï¼…higher than the merged meanings of the old words.