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Japanese Kanji Characters are Small-World Connected Through Shared Components

Authors:
Mark Jeronimus
Sil Westerveld
Cees van Leeuwen
Sandjai Bhulai
Daan van den Berg

Keywords: Japanese characters; Kanji; components; radicals; small-world networks; phase transition; Zipf's law; Gelb's hypothesis

Abstract:
We investigate the connectivity within different incremental sets of Japanese Kanji characters. Individual characters constitute the vertices in the network, components shared between them provide their edges. We find the resulting networks to have a high clustering coefficient and a low average path length, characterizing them as emph{small worlds}. We examine the statistical significance of these findings and the role of the degree distributions. We review the evidence that the small-world topologies of these networks are due to the successive elimination of components in the writing system and discuss the implications of the results for language evolution.

Pages: 53 to 58

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017

Publication date: November 12, 2017

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4464

ISBN: 978-1-61208-603-3

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from November 12, 2017 to November 16, 2017