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On Tuesday, September 19, 2023 at 7:45:34 PM UTC-4, Ross Clark wrote:
> 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
Zipf`s Law has always seemed to me to be a total tautology.
And when I read George Miller`s preface to the MIT reprint for
the first time recently, I found he seems to say the same thing.
> 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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