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报告

Simplification Is Not Dominant in the
Evolution of Chinese Characters

Simon J. Han1, Piers Kelly2, James Winters3, and Charles Kemp1

1Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, 澳大利亚
2Department of Archaeology, Classics and History, University of New England, Armidale, 澳大利亚
3School of Collective Intelligence, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Rabat, 摩洛哥

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杂志

关键词: Chinese characters, cultural evolution, communicative efficiency, 复杂,
distinctiveness

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抽象的

Linguistic systems are hypothesised to be shaped by pressures towards communicative
efficiency that drive processes of simplification. A longstanding illustration of this idea is the
claim that Chinese characters have progressively simplified over time. Here we test this claim
by analyzing a dataset with more than half a million images of Chinese characters spanning
多于 3,000 years of recorded history. We find no consistent evidence of simplification
through time, and contrary to popular belief we find that modern Chinese characters are higher
in visual complexity than their earliest known counterparts. One plausible explanation for our
findings is that simplicity trades off with distinctiveness, and that characters have become less
simple because of pressures towards distinctiveness. Our findings are therefore compatible with
functional accounts of language but highlight the diverse and sometimes counterintuitive ways
in which linguistic systems are shaped by pressures for communicative efficiency.

介绍

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A common expectation about the world’s writing systems is that their symbols evolve to
become simpler over time. This idea is compatible with a broader literature on signed, spoken
and written language that emphasizes ways in which linguistic systems are shaped by the need
to support efficient communication (吉布森等人。, 2019; 凯勒, 2005; Kirby et al., 2015;
Tamariz & Kirby, 2015; Zipf, 1949). Just as speakers simplify and shorten words in order to
communicate with greater efficiency (Kanwal et al., 2017), written symbols undergo compa-
rable transformations that remove superfluous graphical details and reduce visual complexity
(Changizi & Shimojo, 2005; 德阿内, 2009; Garrod et al., 2007; Kelly et al., 2021; Pauthier,
1838; Trigger, 2003).

As the world’s only primary script still in continuous use, Chinese writing is regularly
invoked as a compelling illustration of graphic simplification over historical time. Classical
and modern Chinese philologists have long commented on processes of change and simpli-
fication in the Chinese script (for historical overviews see Behr (2005), Bottéro (1998), 和
Erlman (1990)), and European scholars continued this intellectual trend (Pauthier, 1838;
Warburton, 1741). 例如, H. J. Klaproth suggested that through regular tracing the
once-iconic Chinese characters became more “abbreviated and cursive” as the features of
their images began to “blur and disappear” resulting in a kind of shorthand (Klaproth,

引文: Han, S. J。, 凯莉, P。, Winters,
J。, & 肯普, C. (2022). Simplification
Is Not Dominant in the Evolution of
Chinese Characters. 开放的心态:
认知科学的发现, 6,
264–279. https://doi.org/10.1162
/opmi_a_00064

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00064

补充材料:
https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00064

已收到: 13 二月 2022
公认: 10 十月 2022

利益争夺: 作者
声明不存在利益冲突.

通讯作者:
Charles Kemp
c.kemp@unimelb.edu.au

版权: © 2022
麻省理工学院
在知识共享下发布
归因 4.0 国际的
(抄送 4.0) 执照

麻省理工学院出版社

Evolution of Chinese Characters Han et al.

1832). Consistent with this view, for the past 350 years scholars have produced diagrams of
Chinese characters that depict a straightforward linear sequence from iconic pictures towards
abstract signs (Garrod et al., 2007; Kircher, 1654; Klaproth, 1832; Martini, 1658; Pauthier,
1842), and two similar sequences are shown on the left side of Figure 1. The idea of simpli-
fication remains prominent in modern literature on the Chinese script, and in the literature on
cultural evolution (Fay et al., 2013; Garrod et al., 2007). 例如, Woon (1987, p. 1)
writes that “in the past 4000 年, Chinese characters have always been in a process of
simplification,” and Tsien (1962, p. 183) states that the Chinese script “is evolutional from
complex to simple construction.” Qiu (2000, p. 48) acknowledges exceptions to this general
趋势, but writes that “although there are cases of certain forms becoming more complex, 他们
pale in significance when compared with the importance of simplification.”

Although the idea that characters typically simplify is intuitive, it should not be taken for
granted. Linguistic systems are shaped by multiple pressures—some of these forces reinforce
each other but others act in opposite directions (Haiman, 2010). If we consider a single char-
acter in isolation, reducing the complexity of the character may make it easier to read and
写. Yet if we consider the entire inventory of characters, reducing visual complexity may
make the characters harder to distinguish from each other (Pelli et al., 2006; 威利 & Rapp,
2019). Even a randomly-generated inventory of symbols may be distinctive enough if the
inventory is small, but distinctiveness is harder for large symbol inventories to achieve, 和
may have become especially relevant to written Chinese as the size of the character inventory
has grown over time (Chang et al., 2016; Miton & Morin, 2021). If simplicity and distinctive-
ness trade off against each other, then simplification over time no longer appears to be inev-
itable, and two additional hypotheses must be considered. If the relative weights of these
factors shift in favour of distinctiveness over time, then it is possible that character complexity
will increase, as has occurred for the examples on the right of Figure 1. 或者, 如果

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数字 1. Changes in four pictographic Chinese characters over time. Relative to oracle bone
形式, traditional forms for 山 [mountain] and 車 [vehicle] are simpler but traditional forms for
雨 [rain] and 龜 [turtle] are more complex. The y-axis of each panel shows perimetric complexity.
Our dataset includes an average of around 50 variants of each character for each script but only the
median complexity variant is plotted here.

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Evolution of Chinese Characters Han et al.

simplicity and distinctiveness remain in equilibrium, it is possible that character complexity
will remain steady over time. Some support for this final hypothesis is provided by the recent
work of Miton and Morin (2021) who analyzed a phylogeny including more than a hundred
scripts and report that descendant scripts show no general tendency to either increase or
decrease in complexity relative to ancestor scripts.

To adjudicate between these hypotheses, we examine the evolutionary trends of the Chi-
nese script over the course of its recorded history. We view Chinese writing as a large natural
experiment in which countless readers and writers over thousands of years have shaped its
graphical landscape in ways that reflect the fundamental pressures acting upon the evolution
of writing systems more broadly. By leveraging computational methods at scale, we attempt to
clarify how and why the Chinese writing system has changed in visual complexity over time.

METHOD & 结果

We began by collecting 38,066 images of historical Chinese characters from a popular Chi-
nese etymology website called hanziyuan.net. Hanziyuan includes forms from three key his-
torical scripts: oracle bone script (甲骨文), bronze script (金文), and small seal script (小篆書).
The oldest surviving examples of the Chinese script are oracle bone inscriptions from the
Shang dynasty (加州. 1600–1046 BCE). These texts were incised on ox scapulae and turtle plas-
trons and used in divination ceremonies. Bronze script appears on objects cast in bronze
including vessels, bells and tripods, and was often produced by writing on the soft clay moulds
used to cast these objects. Early bronze inscriptions date from the Shang dynasty and are coe-
val with oracle bone inscriptions, but bronze script is most characteristic of the Western Zhou
(1046–771 BCE) and Spring and Autumn (660–476 BCE) periods. After these periods a variety of
scripts were used by the independent states of the Warring States period (476–221 BCE). 这
country was subsequently unified under the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), and small seal script
was the official standard script during this dynasty. To complete our dataset we added hand-
written modern characters from two scripts: traditional script (正體字) (陈, 2020), 这是
used today in Taiwan, 香港, and Macau and by parts of the Chinese diaspora, and sim-
plified script (简化字) (刘等人。, 2011), which replaced the traditional script in mainland
中国. As described later, we also analyzed printed modern characters, but chose to focus
on handwritten modern forms for maximum comparability with oracle bone forms.

Although our dataset includes more than half a million images of Chinese characters it pro-
vides an incomplete picture of the great diversity of historical Chinese scripts. By necessity we
are constrained to work with sign forms that have survived in the historical record and can be
dated to a period; it is not possible to probe the scope of written traditions that left no trace or
are yet to be uncovered. Even among surviving materials, entire scripts are missing from our
数据, including scripts used during the Warring States period (公园, 2016) and the clerical
script widely used during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). 更远, within any period there
may be substantial differences between the standard form of a character and a range of infor-
mal variants (including cursive forms), and our dataset focuses on standard forms. 尽管
these limitations, our data seem sufficiently rich to determine whether or not the evolution
of Chinese characters shows a general tendency towards simplification, as we explain in more
detail below.

The full set of images includes representatives of 3,889 distinct characters. This set includes
all characters that appear either on hanziyuan.net or in one of our modern handwritten data
套, and also in the Chinese Lexical Database (CLD) (孙等人。, 2018). We focus on characters
from the CLD because our analyses draw on information including character frequency that is

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Evolution of Chinese Characters Han et al.

included in this database. For each of the 3,889 characters in our dataset, we have up to 291
images of its variants from each script. When a character has multiple variants within a single
script, the complexity of a character is defined as the median complexity across all of these
variants. Images from all sources underwent the same preprocessing steps to control for size
and stroke thickness, and full details can be found in the supplementary material.1

Following previous studies (Garrod et al., 2007; Kelly et al., 2021), we define the visual
complexity C of an image as its perimetric complexity (Arnoult & Attneave, 1956; Pelli
等人。, 2006):

C ¼ P 2
4πA

;

(1)

where P is the sum of the interior and exterior perimeters of the image, and A is its area. Peri-
metric complexity has been shown to predict several aspects of human perception including
the efficiency, accuracy and speed of recognizing letters and characters from multiple scripts
including modern Chinese (Chang et al., 2016; Pelli et al., 2006; 王等人。, 2014; 威利
等人。, 2016; 张等人。, 2007). Other complexity measures are possible, 包括
number of black pixels in an image, the length of an image’s description in a standardized
representation language, and measures related to writing such as the number of strokes in a
character and the approximate time taken to write a character. Previous work suggests that
alternative measures like these are highly correlated both with perimetric complexity and with
彼此 ( 王等人。, 2014; 张等人。, 2007), and we report similar results in the
supplementary material. The substantial correlations between all of these measures suggest
that our conclusions are probably robust to the choice of complexity measure.

Changes in Complexity Over Time

数字 2 shows how character complexity has changed across the five scripts in our analysis.
Each character has been assigned to one of four streams depending on the script in which it
first appears in our dataset: 例如, the oracle stream includes all characters for which we
have an oracle bone form. 数字 2 suggests that characters tend to increase in complexity up
to seal script and subsequently become less complex. To confirm the changes in complexity
suggested by Figure 2, we used the brms package (布尔克纳, 2017) to run a Bayesian mixed
effects regression with script as a predictor of complexity, and included character as a random
intercept and a random slope for script. 这 95% credibility intervals for the coefficients that
capture differences between successive scripts all exclude zero, suggesting that the two
increases in complexity up to seal script and the two subsequent decreases are all statistically
可靠的. 数字 2 also includes results for modern characters printed in two fonts. Complexity
scores are substantially higher for printed than for handwritten forms, but regardless of whether
we consider printed or handwritten versions of modern characters, we find that traditional and
simplified forms are both more complex than their oracle counterparts.

数字 2 reveals two distinct ways in which character complexity has increased through
时间. 第一的, the oracle and bronze streams both increase in complexity up through seal script,
suggesting that individual characters often increase in complexity. 第二, the characters in
each successive stream tend to be more complex than characters in previous streams, 建议-
ing that there is a tendency for new characters added to the inventory to be more complex than
existing members. Because our dataset is missing many forms, and because forms from earlier
scripts are more likely to be missing, this finding must be interpreted with caution. 为了

1 Code and data are available at https://github.com/cskemp/chinesecharacters.

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Evolution of Chinese Characters Han et al.

数字 2. Complexity over time of characters grouped according to their first appearance in our
dataset. The first stream (红色的) includes characters for which we have at least one oracle bone form,
and the bronze, seal and traditional streams are shown in yellow, green and blue respectively. 灰色的
lines show results for the traditional stream based on characters printed in two fonts. Line thickness
is proportional to the number of characters included in each stream, and error bars (which are small
and therefore difficult to see) show the standard error of the mean.

例子, thousands of known oracle bone forms are missing from our dataset because they
have never been deciphered.

Although our results reveal a net increase in complexity over 3000 年, we do find evi-
dence of simplification from the seal script on. Scholars often suggest that the transition
between seal script and modern characters involved a process of simplification (Schindelin,
2019), and our results for handwritten (but not printed) traditional characters support this view.
The simplified script was specifically designed to reduce the visual complexity of written
Chinese (Pan et al., 2015), and as expected our results for both handwritten and printed
characters confirm that simplified forms are less complex than traditional forms. Our results
therefore provide partial support for the standard view that writing systems are shaped by
forces that tend towards simplification, but challenge the idea that these forces have been
dominant over the history of the Chinese script.

Although Figure 2 suggests that modern forms tend to be more complex than oracle forms, 这是
possible that some kinds of characters defy this overall trend. Characters with iconic origins,
characters with small numbers of components, and high frequency characters all seem like espe-
cially good candidates for simplification. We now consider each of these subclasses in turn, 和
in all three cases we report consistent evidence for increases in complexity over time.

Informal discussions of the simplification of Chinese often refer to examples involving char-
acters like 車 [vehicle] (见图 1) and 馬 [horse] that originated from detailed illustrations
of animals and other concrete natural elements (Norman, 1988; Qiu, 2000). Because iconic
images tend to be complex, it is natural to think that unnecessary detail should be shed over
时间 (Norman (1988), although see Miton and Morin (2019)), and this intuition probably
accounts for the widespread assumption that Chinese characters typically simplify. 为了测试这个
intuition we drew on the character classifications available in the CLD. Characters classified as
pictographic originate from iconic forms, and pictologic characters are similar but more sym-
bolic in nature. Pictosynthetic characters are combinations of multiple pictographic charac-
特尔斯, and pictophonetic characters are combinations of phonetic and semantic components.
The fifth class (其他) is a catch-all, and each character is assigned to exactly one class. 到

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Evolution of Chinese Characters Han et al.

数字 3. Changes in complexity between oracle and traditional forms. (A)–(乙) Complexity
changes for characters of different types and with different numbers of components. The thin line
at zero represents no change in complexity, and the interior of each violin plot shows the median.
(C) Human ratings of the relative complexity of oracle bone and traditional forms (handwritten or
printed). Each of the jittered grey points shows ratings for one of 155 pictographic characters: 的
characters shown in Figure 1, 山 and 車 are judged to simplify and 雨 and 龜 are judged to become
更复杂. Characters on the zero line have oracle and traditional forms that are rated as
equally complex, and the error bars show the standard error of the mean.

see the strongest possible differences between oracle bone and modern forms we treat tradi-
tional characters as representatives of the modern era, and Figure 3a suggests that characters
from all five classes increased in complexity between the oracle bone and traditional scripts.
The analysis includes only characters that are present in our dataset for both scripts, 和
y-axis (complexification) shows the difference in perimetric complexity between the two
scripts. The supplementary material includes analyses which suggest that the increase in com-
plexity for each class is statistically reliable. We therefore conclude that the net increase in
complexity between oracle bone and traditional forms summarized by Figure 2 applies to
many kinds of characters, including those with iconic origins.

Because our finding that pictographic characters have increased in complexity challenges a
common view about the evolution of writing systems, we developed a preregistered behav-
ioral experiment to address the concern that this finding may be an artifact of perimetric com-
plexity.2 The experiment asked 400 participants who were not fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese
or Japanese to rate the relative complexity of 155 pairs of forms. The characters used were
identical to the 155 pictographic characters assigned to the pictographic group in
Figure 3a. In the handwritten condition, the traditional forms were drawn from the same set
of handwritten characters analyzed in Figure 3a, and in the printed condition the traditional
forms were shown in Hiragino Sans GB. Figure 3c shows that on average traditional forms
were rated as more complex than oracle bone forms in both the handwritten and printed con-
版本. A set of preregistered statistical tests supported this conclusion for handwritten but not
printed characters. Full details are available in the supplementary material, and taken overall
the results support the conclusion that pictographic characters have traditional forms that are
more complex than their oracle bone forms. 此外, the experiment provides some evi-
dence that perimetric complexity is an adequate complexity measure for our purposes.

One way for a character to increase in complexity is to acquire new components. Charac-
ters with modern forms consisting of a single component only (例如, 車 [vehicle]) may therefore

2 The preregistration is available at https://aspredicted.org/x76et.pdf.

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Evolution of Chinese Characters Han et al.

be especially likely to show evidence of simplification. We used data from the Chinese Char-
acters Decomposition (CCD) project to sort our dataset into characters with different numbers
of components ( Wikimedia Commons, 2021). The CCD project is based on simplified char-
acters and provides decompositions that are purely graphical rather than etymological. 甚至
所以, these data provide a useful way to distinguish characters with different numbers of com-
ponents. Figure 3b shows that even characters with a single component have become more
complex over time. Increases in complexity, 然而, tend to be greater for characters with
multiple components than for single component characters.

One possible reason for simplification is that writers sometimes cut corners and simplify
when reproducing a character. On this account, the characters written most frequently should
be most likely to simplify. This hypothesis is consistent with Zipf’s law of brevity, which states
that frequently used linguistic units tend to be especially simple, and with a body of related
work that has explored how language is shaped by efficiency considerations (Bentz & Ferrer-i
Cancho, 2016; Zipf, 1949). We tested this hypothesis by using character frequencies from the
CLD and assuming for simplicity that CLD frequencies (which are based on modern data) 是
also representative of frequencies for earlier scripts. Some characters are components of other
characters, and we define the adjusted frequency of a character as the number of times it is
written per million characters, either in isolation or as part of another character. We sorted our
characters into six frequency bins using a logarithmic scale of base ten, and compared average
character complexity in each bin both within and across scripts.

数字 4 shows that characters within each frequency bin show parallel changes in com-
plexity over time. This result indicates that even the most frequently used characters do not
simplify over time. Although characters in all frequency bins have higher traditional complex-
ities than oracle bone complexities, within each script frequently used characters tend to be

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数字 4. Complexity over time for characters in six frequency bins. The labels of the frequency
bins represent counts per million characters. Only characters for which we have an oracle bone
form have been included.

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simpler. This result is consistent with Zipf’s law of brevity, and suggests that Chinese characters
are indeed shaped by efficiency considerations. 数字 4 also reveals that changes in complex-
ity over time are modulated by frequency, and that frequently used characters tend to show
smaller increases in complexity up to seal script and smaller decreases in complexity thereaf-
特尔. High frequency, 然而, is evidently not sufficient to produce simplification overall. A
statistical analysis supporting all of these conclusions is presented in the supplementary
材料.

Our analyses so far provide consistent evidence that modern characters are more complex
than oracle forms, and suggest that pictographic characters, single-component characters and
high frequency characters are not exceptions to this general trend. These results came as a
surprise to us, and led us to consider possible reasons why complexity may have increased
随着时间的推移. The next section introduces two potential explanations, both of which invoke evo-
lutionary pressures in favor of distinctiveness. Both explanations seem plausible to us, but we
acknowledge that we do not have strong evidence for either one.

Complexity and Distinctiveness

The expectation that characters tend to simplify can be informally motivated by the idea that
writing systems increase in communicative efficiency over time. 简单, 然而, is just
one relevant dimension, and communicative efficiency is best conceptualized as a near-
optimal trade-off between several competing dimensions (坎普等人。, 2018). We focus here
on the trade-off between simplicity and distinctiveness, or the ease with which characters can
be distinguished from each other ( 威利 & Rapp, 2019). If simplicity and distinctiveness are
inversely related—that is, if more complex characters are also more distinctive—then pres-
sures toward distinctiveness could help to explain why complexity has increased over time.
The character inventory could remain communicatively efficient at all stages of this process as
long as simplicity is always maximized for the current level of distinctiveness.

Measuring distinctiveness is challenging, and to our knowledge there is no standard
approach in the literature. We therefore developed our own distinctiveness measure using a
convolutional neural network (CNN) trained to classify handwritten Chinese characters. 这
results emerging from this measure are suggestive, but as we discuss later the measure is
subject to some important limitations. We therefore view our distinctiveness analyses as a
tentative initial exploration that should be revisited and extended in future as improved dis-
tinctiveness measures become available.

Our measure is motivated in part by previous work suggesting that the internal representa-
tions generated by CNN classifiers provide a good account of human similarity judgments
(Peterson et al., 2018). In our case, the CNN is a GoogLeNet architecture trained on a large
database of simplified characters (Zhong et al., 2015). To make our character images maxi-
mally comparable to the images on which the CNN was trained, we included an extra image
processing step that increased the stroke width of each character. Passing an image through
the network generates an activation vector over each layer, and we took the activation over
the final fully connected layer as the representation for each character. Distinctiveness can
then be defined as the average Euclidean distance between a character and its closest 20
contemporary neighbours. The neighborhood size of 20 is based on previous work on
orthographic similarity that uses the same definition of distinctiveness but different underlying
representational spaces (孙等人。, 2018; Yarkoni et al., 2008). In cases where our data include
multiple images for a specific character in a specific script, we treat the median complexity
image as the definitive variant of the character.

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数字 5. Visual complexity trades off against distinctiveness. (A) Relationship between distinctiveness and perimetric complexity for each
script in our dataset. Complexity values are lower here than in Figure 2 because the character images in this analysis have thicker strokes.
(乙)–(C) Relationship between average distinctiveness and average complexity for miniature 50-character inventories. For each script, 样品
were drawn from 6 complexity bins (panel b) 或者 6 distinctiveness bins (panel c).

We used the distinctiveness measure just introduced to explore whether complexity and
distinctiveness trade off against each other. Figure 5a shows that character complexity and
distinctiveness are positively correlated within each script. This result suggests that complexity
and distinctiveness trade off at the level of individual characters, and that individual characters
may need to become more complex in order to become more distinctive. To explore whether
a similar trade-off applies at the level of entire systems of characters, we repeatedly sampled
miniature systems of 50 characters and asked whether systems with higher average distinctive-
ness also tend to be higher in average complexity. We generated samples separately for each
script using two distinct sampling strategies. Figure 5b is based on sorting the characters in
each script into 6 complexity bins (low complexity to high complexity), and then generating
200 random samples within each bin. Figure 5c used a similar approach except that the bins
were based on distinctiveness rather than complexity. In both cases, average complexity and
average distinctiveness were correlated, suggesting that complexity and distinctiveness trade
off at the system level.

Next we considered how distinctiveness has changed over time, and Figure 6a shows a
steady increase in distinctiveness up to the traditional script. To control for inventory size,

数字 6. Changes in distinctiveness over time. (A) Distinctiveness distributions for each script.
The horizontal black lines show medians. (乙) Change in distinctiveness for characters grouped
according to their first appearance in our dataset. Within each stream distinctiveness is always com-
puted with respect to the same set of characters. Error bars show the standard error of the mean.
Grey lines show traditional streams that include characters printed in SimSun (S) or Hiragino Sans
GB (H).

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Figure 6b shows distinctiveness computed with respect to the same set of characters over time.
The oracle stream includes all characters that first appear in the oracle bone script and that are
attested in all subsequent scripts, and the bronze, seal and traditional streams are defined anal-
ogously. Direct comparisons of distinctiveness between streams (例如. bronze vs seal) 不是
possible because the streams have different numbers of characters, and the key question is
how distinctiveness changes over time within each stream. For all streams, Figure 6b reveals
that distinctiveness increases up to the traditional script and then falls.

For comparison with the results for handwritten characters, Figure 6b includes versions of
the traditional stream for characters printed in two fonts. Because handwritten characters are
produced by writers who desire to minimize writing time, we expected distinctiveness scores
to be lower for handwritten than for printed characters. This finding emerges for simplified
characters, but for traditional characters distinctiveness is lower for characters printed in Hir-
agino Sans GB than for handwritten characters. A second unexpected result is that across both
traditional and simplified scripts, distinctiveness is substantially lower for Hiragino than for
SimSun. A possible explanation for both results is that our distinctiveness measure is overly
sensitive to stylistic differences (例如. whether or not a font includes serifs) that are of limited
interest for our purposes.

Our distinctiveness measure is subject to another important limitation which means that the
results in Figure 6 should be taken as suggestive but not conclusive. The neural network that
we used was trained on simplified characters, and may be relatively poor at distinguishing
between oracle bone forms largely because they are qualitatively different from the simplified
forms in the training set. This concern does not affect the finding that distinctiveness and visual
complexity appear to trade off within each script (数字 5), but does affect our comparisons
across scripts (数字 6). Future research can potentially address this concern by supplement-
ing our distinctiveness results with similar analyses based on a network trained on oracle bone
形式.

Establishing a causal account of historical change does not seem possible given the data
available to us, but we offer two plausible explanations of the finding that complexity and dis-
tinctiveness have both increased through time. The first explanation holds that distinctiveness
is the driving factor, and that an increase in distinctiveness has caused complexity to increase.
Distinctiveness is especially relevant to readers, who must distinguish each character viewed
from possible alternatives, and may have become increasingly important as the relative bal-
ance between readers and writers has shifted over time. In the modern era, a character that
is written, carved or inscribed once can be read by an audience of millions, and it seems plau-
sible that the average audience size for each act of writing has steadily increased over time.

The second possible explanation holds that neither complexity nor distinctiveness is the
driving factor, but that both have been influenced by a third factor—the dramatic expansion
of the Chinese character inventory over time. When new characters are added, distinctiveness
must remain above some threshold in order for the script to remain usable. If most of the sim-
ple forms are already taken, new characters will have to be relatively complex in order to
maintain distinctiveness above this threshold, which means that average complexity will
increase over time. 原则, it may be possible to add new characters while holding aver-
age distinctiveness constant, but this possibility may be unachievable if new characters must
created by reusing components of existing characters. 因此, it is possible that increasing
inventory size inevitably requires increases in both complexity and distinctiveness.

Our two possible explanations are not mutually exclusive, and it is possible that the bal-
ance between complexity and distinctiveness has shifted over time and that the expansion of

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the character inventory has driven increases in both complexity and distinctiveness. These two
可能性, 然而, are conceptually distinct, and the first could apply even if the size of the
character inventory were held constant. Although both explanations seem plausible to us, 这
second seems likely to carry more weight because the expansion of the character inventory is
such a striking development in the history of Chinese characters. To understand this develop-
ment in more detail, future studies could simulate different hypothetical strategies for generat-
ing novel characters over time, and could directly test the idea that the only feasible strategies
lead to increases in average complexity and average distinctiveness.

讨论

Writing systems are often thought to simplify over time, but we found that the visual complex-
ity of modern Chinese characters has increased relative to oracle bone forms. This increase in
complexity has occurred at the level of individual characters and at the level of the entire
inventory, whose average complexity has been increased by the addition of relatively complex
characters. The iconicity of early Chinese characters has not stood in the way of this process,
with early iconic forms complexifying over time even as they become more abstract. 高的
频率, likewise, is not enough to protect against increases in complexity. When we look
beyond the popular examples brought forward by proponents of simplification, we see that for
every intuitive example of simplification (例如. left side of Figure 1), there are many other exam-
ples of complexification occurring instead (right side of Figure 1).

A plausible explanation for our results is that writing systems, just like languages, 是子-
ject to multiple competing pressures, including a pressure for distinctiveness that trades off
against a pressure for visual simplicity. Future work can aim to measure and evaluate addi-
tional factors that influence the ease of reading, writing and learning characters. 例如,
the compositionality of the system (迈尔斯, 2019), or the extent to which characters are com-
posed out of standardized recurring elements will affect the ease with which characters can be
学到了. Ease of learning probably trades off against visual simplicity: 例如, Hannas
(1988, p. 210) points out that 鑫 is high in visual complexity but relatively easy to learn
because it repeats a single element three times.

The compositionality of a system can potentially be formulated using a setwise complexity
measure that assesses the complexity of entire systems of characters. One such measure, 为了
例子, defines the complexity of a set as the length of the minimal description of all char-
acters in the set. If the characters in the set are all built from a small library of components,
then the minimal description would involve describing each component then specifying how
the components are combined to form characters. Although our results suggest that the aver-
age visual complexity of individual characters in the Oracle stream has increased over time,
the setwise complexity of these characters may well have decreased as the writing system has
become more compositional. Testing this idea would probably require a sophisticated com-
putational approach that draws on techniques from the literature on computer vision in order
to capture elements that recur across sets of handwritten characters.

Reconciliation With Prior Work

At first sight, our finding that Traditional forms are more complex than Oracle forms seems
directly incompatible with earlier claims about the evolution of writing and of the Chinese
script in particular. Our disagreement with prior research, 然而, is perhaps less fundamen-
tal than it seems. To our knowledge, previous studies have not directly measured changes in
the visual complexity of Chinese characters over time, which means that our findings do not

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conflict with any specific empirical results from the literature. The conflict is rather with gen-
eral claims about how the Chinese script has developed over time.

In the literature on written Chinese, “simplification” has been used in a range of different
方法. In discussions of the shapes of individual characters, simplification is broadly used to
refer to a bundle of changes that includes a progression away from pictorial forms and towards
more abstract symbols in addition to changes in visual complexity. Simplification has also
been used to refer to increases in consistency across tokens of a single character, 并
increases in stylistic consistency across an entire script, including the development of a rep-
ertoire of standard strokes (Qiu, 2000). Because simplification has been used to label so many
different kinds of changes, many previous ideas about simplification remain intact despite our
findings about changes in visual complexity over time.

If we focus on visual complexity in particular, experimental work (Garrod et al., 2007) 和
a prior analysis of the Vai script (Kelly et al., 2021) both suggest that written symbols tend to be
relatively complex when first created but become simpler as they are repeatedly used. 这些
results led us to anticipate similar changes in written Chinese, but in retrospect we see two
important differences between our work and the studies of both Garrod et al. (2007) and Kelly
等人. (2021). 第一的, both previous studies trace the evolution of symbols from their moment of
birth onwards, but the earliest forms in our analysis are drawn from a time at which Chinese
characters had already been in use for hundreds of years. The historical record does not reveal
what the very first Chinese characters looked like, and it is possible that the earliest stages in
the development of the script were characterized by decreases in visual complexity. 第二,
both previous studies considered symbol inventories that were relatively stable in size over
时间, but we considered a system that has significantly increased in size. It is possible that
simplification is typical when the size of an inventory remains constant, but that as an inven-
tory increases in size, complexification becomes necessary in order to hold distinctiveness at
an acceptable level.

Limitations and Caveats

Although our work highlights the idea that the graphic dimension of writing is shaped by gen-
eral functional principles, our results are coloured by the historical and material context in
which written Chinese developed. Our dataset covers a period of approximately 3,000 年;
in this time, the characters that we study have transitioned from brushed and etched signs to
digital fonts typed onto computer screens. There is no doubt that the epigraphic technology
available in a given period has conditioned the degree of complexity that the script could tol-
erate. Just as the change from a reed stylus to a wedge-tipped stylus in mid-third millennium
Mesopotamia introduced a more compact and consistent style of cuneiform, in China a tran-
sition from bone carving to the use of soft-clay impressions, 例如, would have altered
the parameters of graphic possibility (Demattè, 2010; Škrabal, 2019).

The social functions of different scripts are also likely to influence their relative complex-
实体. 例如, scripts used informally may tend to be simpler than scripts used for official
文件, and ornamental scripts used for display purposes may be especially complex. 他的-
torical precedent and contact with other graphic traditions are also factors that bear consider-
ation in any examination of script change. 然而, few palaeographers subscribe to a strictly
deterministic view of script evolution whether in terms of scribal media, social function or
contact. 例如, technological shifts in the production of the Vai script, from reed pens
to modern pencils and digital fonts, do not account for any substantial changes in visual com-
plexity, nor indeed did standardisation campaigns or shifts in genre (Kelly et al., 2021). 这

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reality that the Egyptian hieroglyphic script was transformed into the much simpler hieratic
script is in no way negated by the continued and concurrent use of the hieroglyphic script
for monumental display. 简而言之, we maintain that the material and ideological circumstances
of a writing system are informative but do not overwhelm the dynamics of change brought
about by actual use, including reading, writing and inter-generational transmission.

The most recent phase in the history of written Chinese concerns the simplified script
reform of 1956, when China’s Ministry of Education replaced a core set of characters with
simplified versions. This politically-motivated reform could hardly be characterised as a subtle
invisible-hand process, yet it is still part of the bigger story of script change and demands its
own explanation. 毕竟, deliberate acts of simplification have taken place several times in
the history of the script (for an early example see Semedo (1655, p. 43). Two nation-wide cam-
paigns, 在 1935 和 1977, failed abysmally and even the 1956 reform had its limitations.
Despite affecting only about half of the inventory, the over-simplification of certain characters
nonetheless introduced unintended reading difficulties (Pan et al., 2015) suggesting that the
pull towards distinctiveness is formidable even in the face of heavy reform.

New Directions

Our results suggest that simplification is not the dominant trend in the evolution of Chinese
characters, but additional work is needed to determine the extent to which complexification
已经发生了. One pressing need is for a dataset that includes more scripts than the five ana-
lyzed here. Some of these scripts will correspond to subdivisions of the oracle-bone and
bronze scripts considered here. 例如, oracle-bone sources have been organized into
five periods (Dong, 1964), and measuring complexity changes across these periods may be
揭示. Other scripts could be added to the current dataset, including scripts written
on stone, bamboo, silk, and wood during the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE), clerical script
(隸書), and a variety of cursive and semi-cursive scripts known from the Zhou dynasty on.
Individuating and enumerating historical scripts is unavoidably subjective, but an upper
bound on the number that might be considered is given by Yu Yuanwei (6th century CE),
who listed around 100 script styles, many of which were ornamental and never in everyday
使用 (Tseng, 1993).

Wherever possible, each form in an extended database should be annotated with the esti-
mated date of production, means of production (例如. carved in stone) and the genre of the text
from which the form was collected. Compiling such a database would require a major effort
from a large team of researchers, but would allow analyses of historical change that attempt to
control for genre and means of production. 例如, the “Chinese Calligraphy and Inscrip-
tion Collection” (United Digital Publications, 2005) offers an opportunity to study changes in
calligraphic styles used by poets between ca. 2205 BCE and 1636 CE, while controlling for genre
and medium. Regardless of how carefully an extended database is compiled, large gaps are
不可避免的. 例如, oracle bone texts belong to a relatively narrow genre, and there is
little evidence about how characters were written at the time outside the context of divination.
Despite these gaps in the historical record, the available data seem sufficient to allow robust
tests of Qiu’s claim that instances of complexification “pale in significance when compared
with the importance of simplification” (Qiu, 2000, p. 48).

正如之前所建议的, accounts of the evolution of Chinese often include several distinct
changes under the broad heading of simplification (Qiu, 2000). Our work suggests an alterna-
tive approach that attempts to isolate different factors (例如. visual simplicity, distinctiveness and
compositionality) that influence the ease of reading, 写作, and learning characters, 并

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explore ways in which these factors either support or trade off against each other. We made a
start in this direction by working with formal measures of simplicity and distinctiveness, 但
future work can aim to extend and improve these measures, and to measure and evaluate the
role of additional factors. Characterizing the factors in question is somewhat challenging, 但
exploring trade-offs between these factors may turn out to be even more challenging. 为了
例子, future work should aim to test the idea that attested scripts achieve near-optimal
tradeoffs between simplicity and distinctiveness. Addressing this question will probably
require comparing attested tradeoffs with the tradeoffs achieved by a large space of hypothet-
ical scripts, and characterizing these hypothetical scripts is likely to require a sophisticated
computational approach.

结论

Historical changes in written Chinese have undoubtedly been shaped by multiple factors, 但
our findings nevertheless suggest that modern characters are more complex than their oracle
bone equivalents. This result can be explained in part by a trade-off between simplicity and
distinctiveness, and written Chinese therefore provides yet another example of how linguistic
systems are shaped by competing functional constraints. Although our work challenges the
specific claim that writing systems naturally become simpler over time, it is entirely compat-
ible with the broader view that writing systems are fundamentally shaped by the need for
efficient communication.

致谢

We thank Sven Osterkamp and Wolfgang Behr for drawing our attention to important com-
mentaries on Chinese writing, and Anthony Garnaut, Terry Regier and Yang Xu for comments
on the manuscript. This work was supported in part by ARC FT190100200.

作者贡献

SJH compiled the data, and SJH and CK wrote code for the project. SJH, PK and CK wrote the
纸. All authors discussed the models and analyses and commented on the manuscript.

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参考

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