Japanese Kanji Characters are Small-World Connected Through Shared Components

We investigate the connectivity within different incre- mental sets of Japanese Kanji characters. Individual characters constitute the vertices in the network, components shared between them provide their edges. We find the resulting networks to have a high clustering coefficient and a low average path length, characterizing them as small worlds. We examine the statistical significance of these findings and the role of the degree distributions. We review the evidence that the small-world topologies of these networks are due to the successive elimination of components in the writing system and discuss the implications of the results for language evolution.