Vsauce
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2018–2024
21:05 · 29M views · Sep 15, 2015
Vsauce's explainer on Zipf's law, the pattern in which the frequency of a word is inversely related to its rank. It shows the pattern across many domains and discusses why it remains unexplained.
Linked as an entertaining introduction to Zipf's law and power-law distributions.
9 comments from Hacker News
> You need to know about 20,000 words in any language to sound fluent Are you sure about this? AFAIK the use of words in a language isn't distributed evenly, but according to a Pareto distribution. Thus, you can speak _okay_ knowing only ~500 words, I believe. It won't sound perfect but you'll speak and understand pretty decently. I once wrote a python script which read words from a .txt file full of french words with their english counterparts and then displayed the french word, waiting for you to type your guess. It gave instant feedback which I thought important for learning anything. The file contained the 500 most used french words according to large book surveys. This was in my last year of school and it saved me during tests where I had to write coherent sentences in french. Edit: Here it is! Zipf's law is what it's called.( [LINK] ) and here's an interesting video about it: this video
I won't say it's easy , but it's easier than you might think. Word use follows a power law distribution in all languages ( Zipf's Law, this video is an excellent vsauce cover of the subject ), but the short of it is that within a relatively short amount of time spent studying you'll be able to pick out common words and build from there, even if you started from zero.
Your shock is warranted. It's actually a very deep question, called the Zipf mystery: this video No one really knows why it's true. It's also true across physical constants, not just artificial quantities made up by humans. The same type of distribution pops up in language, in nature, in numbers, popularity of opening chess moves, everywhere.
There's an entertaining "V-Sauce" video about Zipf's law for anyone wanting to learn a bit more about it and to see other examples of where it shows up: this video
Mass-publishing markets are very strongly given to power-law distributions. We hear that "anybody can be famous" (or successful, or ...), but everybody cannot be famous. Attention and publicity are the ultimate zero-sum games: no matter how large a given talent pool, there will only ever be ten top-ten spots, 100 top-100 spots. All you're doing by enlarging the pool is amplifying the competition for those spots. There's another side to the equation, though, which is the scope of the audience . Prior to modern technological methods, and I'm including here everything from relatively modern printing (say, 19th century onward), as well as phonograph, cinema, radio, television, and sound amplification, the reach of any given work was small . A book might have a printing of several thousand copies (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations , ~5,000 initial print run, and the cost at ￡5 was roughly a quarter of a working man's annual wage). A theatre might seat (or stand) a few thousand (the New Globe Theatre: 3,000), and the largest cities had populations of about a quarter million (London in 1600, more or less). Transportation was slow and expensive (Smith again: 2 weeks, by stage coach or horse from Edinborough to London -- that's how he travelled to university himself). [LINK] As a consequence, entertainment was strongly local . There might be small touring acts, local musicians, and in rare cases, artists with a noble or royal patron (think Shakespeare himself, after a fashion, or Handel,