An Introduction to The National Language Research Institute:
A Sketch of its Achievements
Third Edition(1988)/
HTML Version(1997)
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II.3.11 A Study of Uses of Chinese Characters
in Modern Newspapers
(Report 56, 1976. 527 pages)
This book reports on the quantity and uses of Chinese
characters in data from a survey of the vocabulary in the
"Asahi," "Mainiti," and "Yomiuri" newspapers published in
1966. The sample size consisted of an overall total of
991,375 running (total) characters, which contained 3,213
different characters. The estimated total number of
characters in the population was approximately 60,000,000.
This survey is noteworthy for considering both the
percentage of characters used and the kind of linguistic
morphological unit the characters could be used to
represent. For this purpose, we divided character usage
into nine categories: 'independent,' 'compound,' 'affixal, '
'numerical,' 'abbreviated,' 'borrowed,' 'special KUN
(Japanese)-reading,' 'personal name,' 'place name.' Then we
classified each example according to these nine
categories and quantitatively surveyed the use of each
character.
This book contains "An Outline of the Survey," "Outline of
the Results of the Survey," and the "Index" as well as the
following five tables: "Comprehensive Table of All the
Chinese Characters in Order of Frequency of Use," "Table of
Actual Usages of the Chinese Characters," "Table of the
Chinese Characters Divided According to the Newspaper Column in
which they Appeared in Order of Frequency of Use,"
"Comprehensive Table of Chinese Characters According to
their Syntactic Usages," and "Table of Chinese Characters
Classified by Category and Syntactic Usage." This survey not
only describes the actual usage of Chinese characters in
newspapers in 1966, it also presents fundamental data for
considering the role of Chinese characters in contemporary
Japanese.
HAYASI Oki, HAYASI Siro~, SAIGA Hideo, ISIWATA Tosio, and
TUTIYA Sin'iti directed this survey and NOMURA Masaaki wrote the
report of the results.
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