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 let...

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 ...

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 o...

Key takeaways

There are various laws of linguistics; for example, famous words are shorter than less popular words.

These laws apply not only to human language but also to animal communication.

But the most surprising thing is that these rules appear almost everywhere, from spec...

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 Menz...