At 8:58:11 on Monday, 3 October 2005, Grzegorz Jagodzinski
wrote:
> Of course, I can multiply such examples but what for?
I'm sure that if you work hard enough, you can find more
examples. And for every example that you find, I can
produce several showing its use in the customary meaning;
<
http://www.nslij-genetics.org/wli/zipf/> has a bibliography
of 534 items.
Like it or not, the term <Zipf's Law> is most commonly
understood to refer to a specific family of mathematical
relationships derived from the original Zipf's Law, that the
frequency of a word in a corpus is roughly inversely
proportional to its rank. It's been used this way for a
long time: I first encountered it over 40 years ago. There
is moreover a significant mathematical literature on the
subject -- very significant, if one includes power laws in
general. You are of course free to use the term in a
non-standard fashion; just be prepared to explain what you
mean to the majority who automatically give it its customary
meaning.
Brian