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On 20/09/2023 5:22 a.m., sci.lang wrote:
> Same pattern in language, human cells & marine biomass.
>
>
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/catalog-human-cells-math-pattern
>
> cell number is determined by cell division, a process that, when
it goes haywire, leads to cancer. Understanding basic features of cells
like size and number, Hatton says, "could help us understand
abnormalities."
>
> Even though it`s been seen in language, ocean biomass and now
human cells, the origins of the inverse size-number pattern are still a
puzzle. But Hatton says its commonality "might be implying that there`s some
deep, underlying mechanism that could be common to all these different
things. But we`re not there yet
>
I doubt that it will turn out to be some deep cosmic principle.
In the language case ("Zipf`s Law"), the correlation is driven by a
small number (50? 100?) of grammatical words which are extremely
frequent. You need one or more of these pretty much every time you open
your mouth. Grammatical words get reduced through sound change at a rate
higher than the general vocabulary. Just a matter of efficiency. They
convey information, but there are so few that you can get away with
reducing their distinctive phonetic features. (This happens even more
extremely with those that cease to be separate words and become affixes,
which are often single segments.)
You can see this happening in speeded-up time in the history of
Melanesian Pidgin ( > Creole), where belong > blong > bl- (possessive)
or by-and-by > bambai > ba (future), all within a century or so.
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