Studie: Pingviners språk påminner om människans

Sydafrikansk pingvin (Spheniscus demersus) är en art i familjen pingviner. Arten lever på eller nära den afrikanska kusten från Angola till Sydafrika och är vanlig i djurparker.

In linguistics, Brevity law (also called Zipf's law of abbreviation) is a linguistic law that qualitatively states that the more frequently a word is used, the ‘shorter’ that word tends to be, and vice versa. This is a statistical regularity that can be found in natural languages and other natural systems and that claims to be a general rule. Brevity law was originally formulated by the linguist George Kingsley Zipf in 1945 as a negative correlation between the frequency of a word and its size. He analyzed a written corpus in American English and showed that the average lengths in terms of the average number of phonemes decreases as the frequency word increases. He completed this observation showing that, for a Latin corpus, there is a negative correlation between the number of syllables and the frequency of appearance of words. This observation says that the most frequent words in a language are the shortest, e.g. the most common words in English are: the, be (in different forms), to, of, and, a; all of them short words that contain only 1 to 3 letters. He claimed that this Law of Abbreviation is a universal structural property of language, hypothesizing that it arises as a result of individuals optimising form-meaning mappings under competing pressures to communicate accurately but also efficiently.Since then, the research on this linguistic law has continued and it has been empirically verified for almost a thousand languages of 80 different linguistic families when studying the relationship between the size of words measuring them in terms of number of characters in texts and their frequencies. The Brevity law shows to be universal and has also been observed acoustically when word size is measured in terms of word time duration, and recent evidence even suggests that this law also holds in the acoustic communication of other primates.The origin of this statistical pattern seems to be related to optimization principles and derived by a mediation between two major constrains: the pressure to reduce the cost of production and the pressure to maximize transmission success. This idea is very related with the principle of least effort, which postulates that animals, people, even well-designed machines will naturally choose the path of least resistance or "effort". This principle of reducing the cost of production might also be related to principles of optimal compression of based in information theory.

Menzerath's law, or Menzerath–Altmann law (named after Paul Menzerath and Gabriel Altmann), is a linguistic law according to which the increase of the size of a linguistic construct results in a decrease of the size of its constituents, and vice versa.E.g., the longer a sentence (measured in terms of the number of clauses) the shorter the clauses (measured in terms of the number of words), or: the longer a word (in syllables or morphs) the shorter the syllables or words in sounds. According to Altmann (1980), it can be mathematically stated as: y = a ⋅ x − b ⋅ e − c x {\displaystyle y=a\cdot x^{-b}\cdot e^{-cx}} where: y {\displaystyle y} is the constituent size (e.g. syllable length) x {\displaystyle x} size of the linguistic construct that is being inspected (e.g. number of syllables per word) a {\displaystyle a} , b {\displaystyle b} , c {\displaystyle c} are the parametersThe law can be explained by the assumption that linguistic segments contain information about its structure (besides the information that needs to be communicated). The assumption that the length of the structure information is independent of the length of the other content of the segment yields the alternative formula that was also successfully empirically tested.Beyond quantitative linguistics, Menzerath's law can be discussed in any multi-level complex systems. Given three levels, x {\displaystyle x} is the number of middle-level units contained in a high-level unit, y {\displaystyle y} is the averaged number of low-level units contained in middle-level units, Menzerath's law claims a negative correlation between y {\displaystyle y} and x {\displaystyle x} . Menzerath's law is shown to be true for both the base-exon-gene levels in the human genome, and base-chromosome-genome levels in genomes from a collection of species. In addition, Menzerath's law was shown to accurately predict the distribution of protein lengths in terms of amino acid number in the proteome of ten organisms.