Exu Yangi wrote:
> Arrggg ...
>
> Zipf's "law" is not a law.
It would be very nice if you began from "In my personal opinion...". Even if
there is inaccordance here what Zipf's law is, you are the first who state
that there is no Zipf's law at all. Your opinion is also incompatible with
opinion of most famous linguist.
> It is a description of a curve (P(a) =
> 1/(p^a) where a ~= 1). It describes a *FAMILY* of curves. It is a
> description. It is not a law.
And you know it best <sigh>. Thank you for your lecture.
> It is not (to read some of the comments
> here over the last few days) even a good idea. <sigh>.
>
> Now, there has been a lot of yak of "longer words are used less",
> which may be true in some langauge groupes.
No, it is true everywhere and always. That's why Zipf's law is a law.
> I would suggest we
> compare (say) the corpus for Chinese and see if that holds.
Some other factors may function as well. In the Chinese instance it is not
hard to guess what factors they are. Modern Chinese (let's say Mandarin
Chinese) experienced so dramatical simplification of its phonematic system
when compared to Middle Chinese aka Ancient Chinese that the language
communication was in danger because of too much homonyms. You must know
perfectly that traditional Chinese literature is often even incomprehensible
when read (without showing the text) if you read hanzi like in the modern
language.
And Zipf's law functions despite of this factor. For instance: the frequent
suffix -er does not form a syllable even if it is spelt with a separate sign
(= it formed a syllable in the past, when it was not so frequent like
today).
> I mostly lurk this group because (with a couple of notable
> exceptions) there is far too much iignorance.
> If you want to discuss
> a subject, please, please please have some knowledge about it first.
You seem to request sharing your views, not knowledge. Once again, must
everybody affront one another here only because of differences in personal
opinions?
Grzegorz J.
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