Re: Chinese Character Usage Frequency

>>>>> "yong321" == yong321 <yong321@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

yong321> Although there may be no scientific research to prove, I
yong321> assume the character frequency based on a global search
yong321> engine's page count is close to that experienced in
yong321> everyday life by most people speaking that language.

I think you can at *most* claim that it reflects the experience in
everyday *WWW* life. The Internet is frequented by a particular group
of people, and you should not use this sample to generalize on all
people using that language. How many illiterates have you excluded?
How many computer-illiterates have you excluded? And how many
publications that are not put on-line have you excluded? Even for a
literate and computer-literate person, WWW is just a part of his daily
life. Does he not read paper-medium books daily? Does he not write
documents daily, which are not published on any web pages?


yong321> This is not true for a few characters, such as the
yong321> Chinese characters for Mmm, Ehhh, nei4ge4, zhe4g4,
yong321> because they're rarely written down.

Good. You're realizing that what you've done cannot be generalized to
the spoken language in general. Your findings are valid for the
written language only, and limited to the WWW sphere only.



--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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