Robert Lucky, in "IEEE Spectrum", May 2008
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6173
This article talks about the omnipresence of power-law statistics in natural and social phenomena.
"A good example is Zipf's Law for the usage of English words, named for the 20th century linguist George Kingsley Zipf."
"The most common word, the, is used twice as often as the second most popular word (of) and three times as often as the third (and). The nth most popular word has a relative frequency of use of 1/n."
"All the most common words are short, resulting in very efficient transmission of information"
[If Zipf's Law didn't exist] "it would be almost impossible to learn a foreign language".
This indeed is an interesting insight.
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