Pinyin Letter Frequency 拼音字母頻率
Pinyin Letter Frequency
The text used is Chinese translation of “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe.
- The Chinese character to pinyin is done by https://github.com/lxneng/xpinyin
- source full text masque_of_red_death_chinese_pinyin.txt
Pinyin and Keyboard Layout
Here we try to find out which keyboard layout is best for input Chinese with pinyin input method.
Pinyin Letter Frequency Problem, the Removal of V
There is a interesting issue about v and ü in Chinese pinyin. In pinyin, the letter v is not used, but you have ü. However, for pinyin input system, you have a hack of typing v for ü, because otherwise ü is hard to type.
on Microsoft Windows's pinyin input, u also do ü. But not on MacOS.
So, now there is a interesting question when you compile statistics of pinyin letter frequency. Given a piece of Chinese text, you can translate them into pinyin, then compute the letter frequency. In this way, you'll see zero use of v. However, this is not a proper stat for the purpose of keyboard layout, because, people do type v, while your stat no use of the key v.
To fix it, one needs to convert ü to v, then, compute the statistics. But this may not be readily done, because in order to do that, the software that convert chinese into pinyin will need to include tones to create ü.
But, this “error” isn't too bad. Because the character ü in pinyin does not occur frequently. I think mostly it's only used for the chars 女 綠.
See also: