At 5:03:36 PM on Friday, September 30, 2005, Grzegorz
Jagodzinski wrote:
> The Zipf's law says that long words must be shortened
> (irregularily) if they are used with enough frequency.
'Zipf's law' normally refers to Zipf's empirical observation
that the frequency of the n-th most common word in a text is
proportional to 1/n, not to his observation that 'the length
of a word tends to bear an inverse relationship to its
relative frequency', which I suppose is what you have in
mind here. In any case, both of these are empirical
descriptions, so neither can say that anything *must*
happen.
By the way, there's an interesting paper on the relationship
between word length and frequency at
<www.ling.lu.se/persons/Joost/Texts/studling.pdf>.
Brian