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  • From: Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Zipf and B-Hebrew
  • Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 02:38:39 +0200

Dear Whoever You Are,

One of the basic rules of this lits is that each mosting be signed with the full name of the poster. Additional information, such as title, institutional affiliation and place of residence, is optional. This makes for much more pleasant "conversation" and helps us all know who the people behind the posts are. Especially, setting your email identity so that you appear as "biblical hebrew" is not a good way to begin posting on this list. So please identify yourself and then ask the question again.


Yigal Levin
co-moderator


----- Original Message ----- From: "biblical hebrew" <jcr.bhebrew AT gmail.com>
To: "b-hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 13, 2007 8:37 PM
Subject: [b-hebrew] Zipf and B-Hebrew


Hi all,

I was wondering what people's opinions about one of Zipf's ideas are.
Zipf, best known for Zipf's law, suggests that there is a playoff
between ease of speaking and ease of understanding that forces the
distribution of words which have single unambiguous meanings and words that
have multiple meanings discerned from context. That is to say that the
optimal situation for the speaker would be that language consisted of one
word which could express every possible meaning while the optimal situation
for the hearer would be that every word had a unique meaning so that no
ambiguities need be resolved. He further suggests that these conflicting
interests create linguistic forces which cause any given language to, in a
manner of compromise between the needs of the speaker and of the hearer,
have a mix of unambiguous words and words with multiple meanings with the
rarest words typically having a very specific and unambiguous meaning and
the most common words having the most possible semantic meanings
disambiguated by context.

I was wondering what the list members feelings about Zipf's proposal are
with respect to b-hebrew. Are his ideas supported by the evidence in the
b-hebrew corpus? Are there any examples which contradict his proposal?

Thanks in advance for any help.

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James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew Thesis 1 - Aleppo codex machine translation
http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc Thesis 2 - language acquisition simulation


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