Wednesday, March 29, 2023
Word Frequencies
George Kingsley Zipf, "Frequency of Occurrence of Words in Plautus' Aulularia, Mostellaria, Pseudolus, and Trinummus," Selected Studies of the Principle of Relative Frequency in Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), pp. 31-51 (at 31):
Separate entries for homo and hominem (plus other oblique cases further down), faciam and facere, etc., are jarring to my pedantic mind, although I can understand why Zipf did it—he was counting syllables as well as words, after all. The statistics disconcert splitters (because of homonyms) as well as lumpers.
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