The evolution of genomes and language

This paper investigates the conceptual metonymies and metaphors behindSHUI(水, water) andHUO(火, fire), two of the Five Elements (五行,wu-xing) in traditional Chinese thought, as recorded in ancient and modern Chinese. Our analysis shows that: (1)SHUIin ancient Chinese is built around the conceptual metonymiesSHUIFOR FEATURES OF WATER,SHUIFOR BODY LIQUID andSHUIFOR BODIES OF WATER and the conceptual metaphors THOSE WITH FEATURES OF WATER ARESHUIand THOSE WITH FEATURES OFSHUI XINGARESHUI. (2)HUOin ancient Chinese is built around the metonymiesHUOFOR FEATURES OF FIRE andHUOFOR THE POWER/DESTRUCTION OF FIRE and the metaphors THOSE WITH FEATURES OF FIRE AREHUOand THOSE WITH FEATURES OFHUO XINGAREHUO. (3)SHUIandHUOin modern Chinese show an overall similarity with their ancient counterparts, the main differences being that the metaphor THOSE WITH FEATURES OFSHUI XINGARESHUIis absent from modern Chinese and that the metaphor THOSE WITH FEATURES OFHUO XINGAREHUOhas a much narrower coverage in modern Chinese. We discuss what this kind of selective inheritance suggests about the development of Chinese people’s conceptualization of the world.

Bi-text alignment is useful to many Natural Language Processing tasks such as machine translation, bilingual lexicography and word sense disambiguation. Most of previous researches are on different language pairs. This paper presents a diachronic alignment of Ancient and Modern Chinese. Because of the long history of Chinese culture and Chinese writing, lots of Ancient Chinese texts are waiting to be translated into modern Chinese, especially, the comparative study of Ancient and Modern Chinese is a very important way to understand some characteristics in Modern Chinese. After describing some characteristics in Ancient-Modern Chinese bi-texts, we first investigate some statistical properties of Ancient-Modern bi-text corpus, including the correlation test of text lengths between two languages and the distribution test of length ratio data. We then pay more attention to n-m(n>1 or m>1) alignment modes which are prone to mismatch.

The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (IHGSC) recently completed a sequence of the human genome. As part of this project, we have focused on chromosome 8. Although some chromosomes exhibit extreme characteristics in terms of length, gene content, repeat content and fraction segmentally duplicated, chromosome 8 is distinctly typical in character, being very close to the genome median in each of these aspects. This work describes a finished sequence and gene catalogue for the chromosome, which represents just over 5% of the euchromatic human genome. A unique feature of the chromosome is a vast region of approximately 15 megabases on distal 8p that appears to have a strikingly high mutation rate, which has accelerated in the hominids relative to other sequenced mammals. This fast-evolving region contains a number of genes related to innate immunity and the nervous system, including loci that appear to be under positive selection--these include the major defensin (DEF) gene cluster and MCPH1, a gene that may have contributed to the evolution of expanded brain size in the great apes. The data from chromosome 8 should allow a better understanding of both normal and disease biology and genome evolution.

Few-Shot Relation Extraction Towards Special Interests

The 1000 Genomes Project: paving the way for personalized genomic medicine.

In this paper, we utilized ChatGPT to quantitatively analyze the emotional coloring of ‘真是’, including the ratio of its positive and negative, neutral usage. Due to the limitations in analyzing a large number of sentences individually, we employed a research method leveraging ChatGPT. The analysis results showed that out of 1000 sentences, 531 (53.1%) exhibited positive emotional coloring, while 451 (45.1%) displayed negative emotional coloring, 18 (1.8%) exhibited positive emotional coloring. This indicates a higher frequency of positive emotional usage compared to the negative connotations suggested by dictionary definitions. This finding significantly contrasts with the definitions of ‘真是’presented in “The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (7th Edition)” and “Eight Hundred Words in Modern Chinese (Revised and Enlarged Edition)”. These dictionaries define ‘真是’ as a verb and idiom expressing negative emotions. However, examination of the CCL corpus reveals that ‘真是’ is not only used in these two ways but also frequently appears as an adverb. This raises the question of why these three usages are not fully defined in the aforementioned dictionaries. The three different uses of ‘真是’ can be viewed as part of a continuous and unified process of language evolution. Language is a tool for human communication, naturally evolving, transmitting, and adapting as people's living environments change. The combination of ‘真’ and ‘是’, originally words with substantial meanings, has evolved into a grammatical function word and further developed into a pragmatic discourse marker as an idiom. This process can be seen as a natural stage in the evolution of language.

Already in ancient China, philologists started compiling the lists that comprised thousands of characters. The task of creating such lists for various purposes is still relevant in the epoch of information technology and high literacy rates. New words are regularly appearing in the Chinese language, both neologisms and loanwords. The authorities and the Chinese society as a whole show a growing interest in traditional culture and the classical texts of various periods. In modern publications, there are more and more elements from Ancient Chinese and its successor, the Classical written language Wenyan. Due to all these processes, the number of different characters in the present day texts is constantly increasing. New graphs are not created, however, they use those characters, which usually represented in the past or still represent this or that monosyllabic word or a morpheme in disyllabic and polysyllabic words. On the one hand, any characters can be entered on computers with the help of the official Romanized Hanyu Pinyin alphabet or even with the help of the voice input. Modern Chinese, especially the younger generation, not very often write texts by hand. As a result, there is a concern in the Chinese society that the same information technology, and in particular artificial intelligence, will eventually decrease the literacy level even of the educated generation. On the other hand, in the wave of the revival of traditional culture, Chinese intellectuals proposed to return those original variants of characters that were abolished in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s and the 1960s.

This study examines the use of qingwen (an honorific request marker) across three different historical periods in China and unravels the evolved relationship between qingwen -initiated directives of information-seeking and Chinese politeness. Drawing on the CCL Corpus, this study reveals that: first, qingwen is employed by the socially more powerful to solicit thoughts, ideas or simply answers with gong (treating others with respect) in positive standard situations of ancient and vernacular Chinese, thereby achieving traditional Chinese politeness; second, given the collapse of the feudal dynasties and the modernisation of society, a remarkable decline in qingwen usage from vernacular Chinese to modern Chinese can be discerned in official settings of negative standard situations; finally, qingwen is frequently used to echo apparent directives with a dissociative attitude in vernacular and modern Chinese, signalling ostensible politeness. This study contributes to historical pragmatics in Chinese by focussing on the evolution of qingwen -initiated directives of information-seeking.

There are many interesting findings in the translation history of Icelandic and Chinese literature although direct translations between the two languages were rare for a long time. Both nations are known for their rich literary heritage and the choice of literary works for translations has largely been influenced by social circumstances and the political atmosphere of each period. In this overview of translations these editorial choices will be reviewed and explained with historical context. Literary translations between Icelandic and Chinese can be divided into three time periods: 1. The first steps, from the first published translation in 1921 until 1937. 2. The socialists’ enthusiasm, from the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 until 1977. 3. Time of balance and increased communications, from 1978 up till now. In 2021 a hundred years have passed since the first publishing of a Chinese literary work in Icelandic. The famed philosophical texts of Daodejing《道德经》, attributed to Laozi, were the first to be translated and published in Iceland, with the Icelandic title Bokin um veginn. Since then a lot of Chinese literature has been translated into Icelandic and direct translations from both ancient and modern Chinese have been published. Likewise, a great deal of Icelandic literature has been translated into Chinese. The first literary work to be translated into Chinese comprised a selection of poems from The Passion Hymns by Hallgrimur Petursson, published in 1928 under the title Shijiakefeng《詩家可風》. Altogether, works by more than 70 Icelandic authors have been translated and published in China, varying from Icelandic Old Norse literature, such as the eddaic poems and the sagas, to the poetry and literature of modern-day writers. Keywords: translation history, translations, literature, Chinese, China

Except nouns, verbs, adjectives and their adjuncts, many other words in ancient Chinese are very abstract. Ancient scholars, in research and discussion about these words, often categorized them into one group and called them “auxiliary words” “modal auxiliary words” or “function words”.

The purpose of the article is to illuminate the influence of Sanskrit drama on the process of traditional Chinese drama genesis, to introduce into a Ukrainian- language scientific turn of a series of information on the history of Chinese culture that is only available in modern and ancient Chinese. The research methodology is to use a combination of historical, structural, typological-comparative research methods. This methodological approach allows us to reveal and analyze the influence of the Indian Sanskrit drama on the formation of Chinese drama. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the comprehensive coverage of the problems of the genesis of the Chinese traditional drama in the context of the Indian influence on the formation of the genre paradigm of Chinese traditional drama, as well as the systematization of material provided by Chinese researchers in Chinese, which has not yet been translated into the Ukrainian language and, in most cases, not entered into a scientific rush within the framework of the English literary criticism and cultural discourse. Conclusions. The idea of a dramatic action originated in India, and later, during the first millennium AD, the Indian Sanskrit drama was exported to the territory of East Turkestan and to the territory of Southeast Asia. Subsequently, the Uighur theater had a direct influence on the formation of the Chinese civilizational and cultural environment, which can be considered proven in the context of the actual material presented in the works of Chinese researchers, systematized and presented above. In the process of forming a genre paradigm of Chinese drama, in particular, the structure of the system of the role of Indian drama had a direct influence, as well as Indian influence was the structure of drama, there is a significant number of Chinese dramas, which present the motives of Chinese Buddhism

Characters and symbols play an important role of historical development and cultural transmission. Automatic ancient character recognition has become a meaningful and typical task. However, the existing recognition methods mostly focus on the detection and classification of modern Chinese, there are lack of the research on ancient Chinese, especially pre-Qin characters. And the methods are mainly computer graphics, topology, support vector machines (SVM) and convolutional neural networks (CNN), these methods lack attention to character features. Thus, based on ancient Chinese characters dataset of Tsinghua Bamboo Slips, the method proposed in this paper add attention mechanism to recognition algorithms to replace traditional convolution in order to improve recognition accuracy. Besides, we propose a data augmentation method specifically for character images, as much as possible without changing the writing form of Chinese characters. Experimental results demonstrated that our method has achieved a top5 accuracy of 99.98% which is higher compared with other methods.