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A Common Construction Pattern of English Words and Chinese Characters
Rankings are ubiquitous around the world. Here I investigate spatial ranking patterns of English Words and Chinese Characters, and reveal a common construction pattern related to phase separation. In detail, I analyze a list of different words in the English language, and find that the frequency of...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Public Library of Science
2013
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3759465/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24023946 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074515 |
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author | Huang, Jiping |
author_facet | Huang, Jiping |
author_sort | Huang, Jiping |
collection | PubMed |
description | Rankings are ubiquitous around the world. Here I investigate spatial ranking patterns of English Words and Chinese Characters, and reveal a common construction pattern related to phase separation. In detail, I analyze a list of different words in the English language, and find that the frequency of the number of letters per word linearly or nonlinearly decays over its rank in the frequency table. I interpret the linearly decaying area as a linear phase that covers 96.4% words, which is in sharp contrast to a nonlinear phase (representing the nonlinearly decaying area) that covers the remaining 3.6% words. Amazingly, the phase separation phenomenon with the same two percentages of 96.4% and 3.6% holds also for the relation between strokes and characters in the Chinese language although English and Chinese are two distinctly different language systems. The common construction pattern originates from the log-normal distributions of frequencies of words or characters, which can be understood by the joint effect of both the Weber-Fechner law in psychophysics and the principle of maximum entropy in information theory. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3759465 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2013 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-37594652013-09-10 A Common Construction Pattern of English Words and Chinese Characters Huang, Jiping PLoS One Research Article Rankings are ubiquitous around the world. Here I investigate spatial ranking patterns of English Words and Chinese Characters, and reveal a common construction pattern related to phase separation. In detail, I analyze a list of different words in the English language, and find that the frequency of the number of letters per word linearly or nonlinearly decays over its rank in the frequency table. I interpret the linearly decaying area as a linear phase that covers 96.4% words, which is in sharp contrast to a nonlinear phase (representing the nonlinearly decaying area) that covers the remaining 3.6% words. Amazingly, the phase separation phenomenon with the same two percentages of 96.4% and 3.6% holds also for the relation between strokes and characters in the Chinese language although English and Chinese are two distinctly different language systems. The common construction pattern originates from the log-normal distributions of frequencies of words or characters, which can be understood by the joint effect of both the Weber-Fechner law in psychophysics and the principle of maximum entropy in information theory. Public Library of Science 2013-09-02 /pmc/articles/PMC3759465/ /pubmed/24023946 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074515 Text en © 2013 Jiping Huang http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Huang, Jiping A Common Construction Pattern of English Words and Chinese Characters |
title | A Common Construction Pattern of English Words and Chinese Characters |
title_full | A Common Construction Pattern of English Words and Chinese Characters |
title_fullStr | A Common Construction Pattern of English Words and Chinese Characters |
title_full_unstemmed | A Common Construction Pattern of English Words and Chinese Characters |
title_short | A Common Construction Pattern of English Words and Chinese Characters |
title_sort | common construction pattern of english words and chinese characters |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3759465/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24023946 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074515 |
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