Author: Robby Berman / Source: Big Think
- Zipf’s law of abbreviation and Menzerath’s law seem to govern not just human speech but chimpanzee gestures.
- Fifty-eight individual chimp gestures were catalogued in a new study.
- Their presence points to an intriguing overlap between language and genetic chemistry.
Quantitative linguistics is a field that seeks to unmask mathematical laws that govern speech patterns and rhythms. Its researchers have found that underpinning human languages is what appears to be a universal desire for compression — getting meaning down into the most concise and easily intelligible forms possible.
Two laws in particular have gained wide acceptance: Zipf’s law of abbreviation and Menzerath’s law. A study just published by the Royal Society on February 13 reveals that the gestural language of chimps at play is also based on these two maxims, a finding that implies that these two laws may have a role to play outside human language.
One of the study’s authors, Raphaela Heesen, tells New Scientist, “Primate gestural communication is, of course, very different to human language, but our results show that these two systems are underpinned by the same mathematical principles.”
In fact, the influence of Zipf’s and Menzerath’s laws on the structure of chimp gestures is not even the strangest place it’s been found: They’ve also been seen operating in genetic structures.
Zipf’s and Menzerath’s laws
Here’s what the two laws state in respect to language.
- Zip’s law of abbreviation: Linguist George Kingsley Zipf found that the length of words is inversely proportional to the frequency with which they’re used. Among the 5,000 most frequently used words in English, the top five are “the,” “be,” “and,” “of,” and “a” — all quite short. In the bottom 10 are words like “manual,” “plaintiff,” middle-class,”…
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