Ján Mačutek | Mathematical Institute of Slovak Academy of Sciences | Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra
Ten chapters from a Russian novel and its translations into Croatian, Serbian, and Ukrainian are automatically syllabified following the same approach in all four languages. Syllable frequencies and syllable length are modelled by probability distributions which are commonly used for frequency and length of words (the Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution and the Dacey-Poisson distribution, respectively). We show that Zipf’s law of brevity, according to which the more frequent words tend to be shorter, can be extended to syllables. We suggest a generalization of the Menzerath-Altmann law, a relation between word length and the mean syllable length. The generalized version of the law is valid for both word types and word tokens.
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Cited by 1 other publications
Motalová, Tereza, Ján Mačutek & Radek Čech
2023. Word Length in Chinese: The Menzerath-Altmann Law is Valid After All. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 30:3-4 ► pp. 304 ff.
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