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All human languages have a very strange and most unexpected secret in common. It is called Zipf's Law, after the linguist George Zipf, who discovered it in 1939. He studied texts in many different languages and ranked the words in order of frequency. What he found, which has since proved to be true whether the language is English or Inuit, Japanese or Xhosa, Arabic or Urdu, is that a direct, exact, unvarying and utterly counter-intuitive mathematical relationship exists between the rank of a word and the actual frequency of occurrence of that word. No matter whick text he selected, when Zipf created a histogram that plotted word frequency against word rank, the suprising result was a straight line "with a slope of -1 for every human language." Graham Hancock - Supernatural - 2006

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16y ago

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