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Relationship between word frequency and word length - Printable Version

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Relationship between word frequency and word length - Addsamuels - 01-10-2023

I think that in European languages, the most common words are short, whereas the rarer are longer on average. This is to say, that the word length is inversely proportional to the word frequency on average.


Here are some examples:

English:
Code:
you 28787591 i 27086011 the 22761659 to 17099834 a 14484562 's 14291013 it 13631703 and 10572938 that 10203742 't 9628970 of 8915110 is 7400675 in 7337058 what 6900164 we 6755687 me 6444985 this 5739788 he 5516364 for 5174060 my 4938948 on 4821861 have 4764010 your 4610945 do 4419883 was 4401531
French
Code:
de 8435682 je 8308698 est 6942248 pas 5833676 le 5305591 que 5083052 la 4825603 vous 4500162 tu 4434920 un 4360896 c' 4184576 à 4119959 et 4110855 il 4025241 a 3679682 l' 3675406 ne 3343288 les 3046663 j' 2981242 en 2925411 on 2756346 ça 2742676 une 2717481 d' 2603041 ce 2533544
German
Code:
ich 5890279 sie 3806767 das 3122198 ist 3025610 du 2947020 nicht 2756783 die 2484854 es 2303025 und 2289891 der 1726001 wir 1721620 was 1696010 zu 1424706 er 1352161 ein 1315301 in 1231372 ja 1054114 mir 1019451 mit 1014541 wie 928920 den 920646 mich 893076 auf 881418 dass 879520 aber 854492
Italian
Code:
e 7389373 non 6257811 che 6063914 di 5880995 la 3887197 il 3726599 un 3555300 a 3451723 per 2866558 è 2559257 in 2156931 una 2153925 mi 2013071 sono 2005178 ho 1823350 l' 1819882 si 1772472 ha 1662783 ma 1650248 lo 1507340 cosa 1462858 con 1440540 no 1433410 le 1425870 ti 1405833
Some languages have longish words which are very common, Greek's είναι (4th) and German vielleicht (104th)
However in the Voynich the most common words is Daiin, and it seems that people say that it plays more of a verb role (this maybe because it looks like an infinitive in a Western European Language.

Obviously the handwriting is unclear in the manuscript and thus we don't know all of the gaps, but the legnth of the word may be an important step for the decipherment.
Regards, Alex

RE: Relationship between word frequency and word length - Koen G - 01-10-2023

The problem is that we don't know the length of the word. [Daiin] doesn't exist, it is just a way we (using the EVA system) talk about these glyphs. But arguments could be made to see [iin] or even [aiin] as a single glyph, which would make it a short word. 

Not that this would fix Voynichese word length statistics overall. But we can never make the mistake of equating the EVA system with "Voynichese", especially not when it comes to statistics like word length. EVA is fairly analytical stroke-wise.

RE: Relationship between word frequency and word length - MarcoP - 01-10-2023

See Zipf's law of abbreviation.

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Currier B is even more puzzling, with words like qokeey and qokeedy being very common. I vaguely remember that the issue was discussed by Timm and Schinner.

RE: Relationship between word frequency and word length - ReneZ - 01-10-2023

This should be well known.... :

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