Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas eBook : Thomson, Jonny: Amazon.co.uk: Books

The first linguistic rule concerns the frequency of a language's most frequently used words. This is known as Zipf's rank-frequency law and holds that the relative frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its frequency rank. In other words, the most frequently used word will be twice as often as the second most commonly used word, three times as often as the third most frequently used word, and so on. For example, the most common word in English is seven percent of all the words we use. The next most common is about 3.5 percent.

The second linguistic rule we can apply to life is Zipf's law of abbreviation, which describes the tendency for more commonly used words to become shorter. This applies to hundreds of different and unrelated languages, including sign language. In English, the seven most common words are three letters or less, and there are only two words in the top 100 (people and therefore) that have more than five letters. The words we use most often are short and to the point.

Communication between birds and mammals tends to be short. Indeed, it can be seen in the songs of black-headed tits, the duration of the calls of Formosa macaws, the vocalizations of the indri, the timing of chimpanzees' gestures, and the length of surface behavioral patterns in dolphins. Humans are not the only ones who want their language to be effective.

Take a sentence such as this one, with all its words, long and short, joined together, punctuated by commas, sunk into each other to reach the final (and breathtaking) finale. It should be noted that although a sentence is long, it is divided into relatively small sentences. This is known as Menzerath's law, in which there is a negative relationship between the size of the whole and the size of the parts. This can be seen not only in sentence construction; the law applies to short phonemes and syllables found in long words.

Although the article focuses mainly on these three laws, it points to others that can still be found (those that are so far under-researched and understudied). For example, Herdan's law (the correlation between the number of unique words and text length) is evident in the proteomes of many organisms, and Zipf's law of meaning frequency (in which more common words have more meanings) is evident in primates. Gestures.