Zipf's law in phonograms and Weibull distribution in ideograms: comparison of English with Japanese.
Frequency distribution of word usage in a word sequence generated by capping is estimated in terms of the number of "hits" in retrieval of web-pages, to evaluate structure of semantics proper not to a particular text but to a language. Especially we compare distribution of English sequences with Japanese ones and obtain that, for English and Japanese phonogram, frequency of word usage against rank follows power-law function with exponent 1 and, for Japanese ideogram, it follows stretched exponential (Weibull distribution) function. We also discuss that such a difference can result from difference of phonogram based- (English) and ideogram-based language (Japanese).
Nabeshima
Terutaka
T
Graduate School of Science & Technology, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan.
Gunji
Yukio-Pegio
YP
D002681:China; D007564:Japan; D007802:Language; D012660:Semantics