George Kingsley Zipf, “Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort”, 1949 was the topic of an earlier blog post.
Here I present: George Kingsley Zipf, “Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort”, 1949, PART TWO (II).
Zipf’s law is an linguistic law that holds, when a list of words is sorted in decreasing frequency. It states that, the frequency of the nth entry is inversely proportional to n.
An English list of the twenty (20) most frequent words is the ATOP graph and the BELOW list.
#1 and
#2 the
#3 of
#4 to
#5 in
#6 a
#7 we
#8 that
#9 with
#10 they
#11 our
#12 for
#13 at
#14 by
#15 which
#16 but
#17 on
#18 was
#19 as
#20 this
Zipf’s law is word rank is proportional to the word frequency. 
This applies to any language; but, here the example is English.
ABOVE is the English language in the Germanic family tree.
Here I presented: George Kingsley Zipf, “Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort”, 1949, PART TWO (II).
SUMMARY.
This blog post discussed Zipf’s law; however, Swadesh’s law is an equally important in lexicostatistics. Shelia Embleton used Swadesh’s law on English, which is the Germanic language family. The cladogram (family tree) is shown BELOW.
Sheila Embleton (1985), “Lexicostatistics applied to the Germanic,Romance, and Wakashan families”, Word, volume 36, pages 37-60 was the topic of an earlier blog post.
COMMENTS.
This blog post was on Zipf’s law and ranking of words. An initial language (C) evolves into languages (B) & (A) shown BELOW. The created new languages (B) & (A) have different rankings of cognates from the initial language (A). In the Germanic family, English and related languages differ in the Zipf ranking order of cognate words.
