Using Networks Analysis to Understand Written Chinese
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-319-05401-8_30.pdf
In my personal experience of studying Mandarin Chinese, the thing that was the most daunting when I first started learning, like many students learning Chinese as a second language, was the writing system, 汉字(hàn zi), written symbols that represent words instead of sounds. In earlier forms, Chinese characters were pictographs—as it developed into a standardized language these pictographs evolved into combinations of simple components, called radicals. The more I learned, the more I was able to identify individual radicals within a larger, more complex character.
In the paper linked above, the Chinese character system is treated as a complex network, in which nodes represent written components of a character, and a connection between nodes indicates a structural relationship between those two components. The networks generated were all dominated by a giant component; showing that nearly all characters are structurally related to each other. The writing system is building upon a set of simple components. These links are directed and asymmetric; smaller components will point towards a larger, more complex character.
Within a radicals-only network, path distance between nodes was 1, as these basic components were all directly connected to each other. As characters became more complex, path distances also increased; characters began to build on one another and develop more complex structural relationships. Clustering coefficients within the only radical networks had a significantly higher clustering coefficients compared to those that also contained more complex characters. This reflects the centrality of the radicals, and how connected they are in terms of structure. The large coefficients of these networks imply the close structural relationships Chinese characters have.
