All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is known as Zipf's law.
  • sga@lemmings.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    Zipf’s Law is far more universal than human language, It is almost appears naturally if we start with a few simple conditions - consider a finite total group, and a initial distribution, where different elements have different wights and growth rates of elements is proportional to weights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf’s_law

    • balsoft@lemmy.ml
      0·
      10 days ago

      Still kind of interesting that those conditions are satisfied here, and (according to the article) it does indeed suggest that the song is learned rather than genetic. I wonder if there are studies for other animals, e.g. ones for which we know that their communications are passed down genetically.