  Corpus-based statistical analysis plays a significant role in linguistic
research, and ample evidence has shown that different languages exhibit some
common laws. Studies have found that letters in some alphabetic writing
languages have strikingly similar statistical usage frequency distributions.
Does this hold for Chinese, which employs ideogram writing? We obtained letter
frequency data of some alphabetic writing languages and found the common law of
the letter distributions. In addition, we collected Chinese literature corpora
for different historical periods from the Tang Dynasty to the present, and we
dismantled the Chinese written language into three kinds of basic particles:
characters, strokes and constructive parts. The results of the statistical
analysis showed that, in different historical periods, the intensity of the use
of basic particles in Chinese writing varied, but the form of the distribution
was consistent. In particular, the distributions of the Chinese constructive
parts are certainly consistent with those alphabetic writing languages. This
study provides new evidence of the consistency of human languages.
