Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
An idle question. English has a relatively low entropy as a
language. Don't recall the exact figure, but if you look at words
that start with "q" it is very low indeed.
What about other languages? Does anyone know the relative entropy
of other alphabetic languages? What about the entropy of
ideographic languages? Pictographic? Hieroglyphic?
The most general answer is in a very old paper of Mandelbrot's.
Sorry, I don't recall the exact reference or have it to hand.
He starts from information theory and an assumption that
there needs to be some constant upper bound on the
receiver's per-symbol processing time. From there, with
nothing else, he gets to a proof that the optimal frequency
distribution of symbols is always some member of a
parameterized set of curves.
Pick the right parameters and Mandelbrot's equation
simplifies to Zipf's Law, the well-known rule about
word, letter or sound frequencies in linguistics.
I'm not sure if you can also get Pareto's Law which
covers income & wealth distributions in economics.
--
Sandy Harris
Quanzhou, Fujian, China
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