kipf's law revisited. next entry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law

D: I did not quite understand what this law is.

Zipf's law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, which occurs twice as often as the fourth most frequent word, etc. For example, in the Brown Corpus "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus.

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D: nonetheless, it shows that common words should also be brief- and easy.

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Next entry.
Well the university library wants SPE back. I paid 5 bux in late fines so far.
I can see I need more time with the book to figure it out.
I ordered it for 60 bux from the local Coles book store.
It should be in within 2 weeks.

The young woman behind the counter at the book store had heard of Esperanto. She is a language enthusiast.
That is the only type that HAS heard of it. I find it nearly impossible to retain what Esp-o I've learned without somebody to practise it with. Ditto ASL.

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Next blog.

I plan to look at Esperanto words, and then guess how an Anglophone will deform them using English rules for altering syllable stress and sounds.

The more I read, the more I think any aux-lang worth its salt must avoid treating voiced/voiceless consonant pairs as discrete.