Zipf’s law in Toki Pona
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0047/000462Keywords:
Zipf’s Law, Toki Pona, artificial languages, computational linguistics, statisticsAbstract
Zipf’s Law states that within a given text the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table of the words used in that text. It is a statistical regularity of a power law that occurs ubiquitously in language – so far every language that has been tested was found to display the Zipfian distribution. Toki Pona is an experimental artificial language spoken by hundreds of users. It is extremely minimalistic – its vocabulary consists of mere 120 words. A comparative statistical analysis of two parallel texts in French and Toki Pona showed that even a language of such scarce vocabulary adheres to Zipf’s Law just like natural languages.
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