Graduate Student Connects Analysis of Spoken Language With Einstein's Theory--Says Language Moves in Four Dimensions

An entirely new theory of language which seeks to put the "stream of spoken language" on a physical, psychological, and mathematical basis, and to connect it with current theories of relativity, has been advanced by Mr. G. K. Zipf 4G in a thesis which will appear in the present issue of the Harvard Studies in Classical Philology.

Zipf, who recently received a grant from the General Education Board to extend his researches into the field of Chinese, maintains that the "conspicuousness" (that is, roughly, the difficulty of pronunciation) of any word, syllable, or sound is inversely proportionate to its relative frequency, and that as any word is used more often, it becomes polished and more easily pronounceable. He cites "auto" for "automobile" and "I wanna go" for "I want to go" as obvious examples, and points out that among 100,000 connected words the term "master" occurs only 13 times, while the term "mister", familiar to the ear, therefore more lightly accented and less "conspicuous", occurs 148 times.

Analysis of fifteen language, ancient and modern gives statistical proof that this new law of language applies to syllables as well as words. With mechanical accuracy the more common cases of inflected nouns in Sanskrit are accented on the stem, while less used cases, genitive and dative for example, are accented on the endings to aid the hearer's ear. "For man's tendency to laziness," says Zipf, "will prevent his accenting any element in language which his hearer will understand with cut accent."

So also with individual sounds: Zipf has gathered statistics in thirteen languages as widely separated in time and space as Bulgarian, Italian, and Sanskrit, and finds in them a startling confirmation of his theory. For in all these tongues, offsprings of the ancient Indo-European parent, the less "conspicuous" sounds are the more frequent. Thus "t" occupies about 7 per cent in all these languages, "d" about 3, 1-2 per cent; the very "conspicuous" "dh" is rarest of all dentals.

He expresses his theory mathematically on a graph: the product of X (frequency) times Y (conspicuousness) is some constant N. "We might fill in X and Y with their actual values," he says, "and solve the equation for N: we should undoubtedly find N a number varying infinitesimally from person to person, slightly from dialect to dialect, distinctly from culture to culture, and vastly between the languages of primitive and civilized men. In fact, I believe that an understanding of N will ultimately lead to an understanding of that stuff called Life."

From the impossibility of putting the "frequency-conspicuous" curve of all the various elements of language on the same mathematical graph, he implies that language moves in four dimensions, as psychologists likewise follow Einstein in believing our emotions are four-dimensional.

In answer to a query. "Will the radio and the talking pictures make speech similar throughout the United States?" he replied, "I believe not. English seems to be splitting up into dialects more and more."