(06-03-2019, 03:59 PM)geoffreycaveney wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We would have to look up the details in the Samarin book to confirm or refute this.
Good idea. Sadly, the closest library having a copy of the book is 200 km from where I live (there are 3 copies in Italian libraries): so I am afraid I will be unable to check.
(06-03-2019, 03:59 PM)geoffreycaveney wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Regarding Zipf's law, we need to consider studies such as Wentian Li (1992) "Random Texts Exhibit Zipf's-Law-Like Word Frequency Distribution" (reference 11 in the Wikipedia article on "Zipf's law"). Quoting the article, "in a document in which each character has been chosen randomly from a uniform distribution of all letters (plus a space character), the 'words' follow the general trend of Zipf's law."
Thus, while it may be useful in some linguistic analysis of a known natural language text to consider the likelihood of the Zipfian distribution of the words in it, the converse may in fact not be true: The mere existence of a Zipf's law distribution of the words in a text of unknown character may actually not necessarily be indicative of an underlying natural language in the text.
This is well known, but it doesn't tell us anything about glossolalia following Zipf's law or not.