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By using a vast number of examples in social and economical data including natural languages, George Zipf was able to show an amazingly robust functional form of the rank-frequency plots [1], f ~ 1/r (f for frequency, r for rank), now commonly called Zipf’s curve or Zipf’s law. George Miller, a renowned linguist, summarized this study in 1965: “Faced with this massive statistical regularity, you have two alternatives. Either you can assume that it reflects some universal property of human mind, or you can assume that it represents some necessary consequence of the laws of
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Tsonis et al. (1997) studied this question.
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