Mustafa Ergen

Zipf's Law of Abbreviation in a Logographic Script: Coding-Theoretic Bounds on Chinese Character Stroke Counts

Zipf's law of abbreviation -- the tendency of frequent forms to be short -- is one of the best-supported regularities in language, and recent work has moved from demonstrating it to measuring how far lexicons are compressed relative to principled baselines. That programme has so far addressed word lengths in alphabetic...