Structural Complexity of Simplified Chinese Characters

In this paper, we studied, from a synergetic perspective, the relationship between the structural complexity and frequency of simplified Chinese characters. We measured the structural complexity of simplified Chinese characters by both the number of strokes and the number of components. Then, we tested whether the relationship between simplified Chinese character’s structural complexity and their frequency fits Zipf’s law by analyzing the most frequent 3061 simplified Chinese characters from the Chinese Character Frequency Dictionary. The result shows that the relationship between simplified Chinese characters’ structural complexity of both measurements and the frequency of those Chinese characters abides by the Zipf-Mandelbrot law.