Quantitative Analyses of Chinese Poetry of Tang and Song Dynasties: Using Changing Colors and Innovative Terms as Examples
This research provides insights into the evolution of Chinese literary language, but it is incremental as it applies existing quantitative methods to historical poetry data.
The study analyzed vocabulary differences between Tang Shi and Song Ci poetry, identifying new words that emerged in Song Ci and persist in modern Chinese, and compared the most frequent color words used in both periods.
Tang (618-907 AD) and Song (960-1279) dynasties are two very important periods in the development of Chinese literary. The most influential forms of the poetry in Tang and Song were Shi and Ci, respectively. Tang Shi and Song Ci established crucial foundations of the Chinese literature, and their influences in both literary works and daily lives of the Chinese communities last until today. We can analyze and compare the Complete Tang Shi and the Complete Song Ci from various viewpoints. In this presentation, we report our findings about the differences in their vocabularies. Interesting new words that started to appear in Song Ci and continue to be used in modern Chinese were identified. Colors are an important ingredient of the imagery in poetry, and we discuss the most frequent color words that appeared in Tang Shi and Song Ci.