All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is known as Zipf's law.
  • sga@lemmings.worldEnglish
    4·
    5 hours ago

    Zipf’s Law is far more universal than human language, It is almost appears naturally if we start with a few simple conditions - consider a finite total group, and a initial distribution, where different elements have different wights and growth rates of elements is proportional to weights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf’s_law

    • balsoft@lemmy.ml
      2·
      5 hours ago

      Still kind of interesting that those conditions are satisfied here, and (according to the article) it does indeed suggest that the song is learned rather than genetic. I wonder if there are studies for other animals, e.g. ones for which we know that their communications are passed down genetically.

      • Zerush@lemmy.ml
        1·
        2 hours ago

        I think that in general Cetaceans and Delphinoids are the most intelligent beings after (many) human beings. But also that many animals are much smarter than we thought before. Language is also much more widespread among animals, for example Prairie Dogs and Mercats have a differentiated language, in their alarm calls the type of the danger and even the color of the animal. They literaly spezify eg an black snake with grey stripes.