A common construction pattern of English words and Chinese characters.

Abstract

Rankings are ubiquitous around the world. Here I investigate spatial ranking patterns of English Words and Chinese Characters, and reveal a common construction pattern related to phase separation. In detail, I analyze a list of different words in the English language, and find that the frequency of the number of letters per word linearly or nonlinearly decays over its rank in the frequency table. I interpret the linearly decaying area as a linear phase that covers 96.4% words, which is in sharp contrast to a nonlinear phase (representing the nonlinearly decaying area) that covers the remaining 3.6% words. Amazingly, the phase separation phenomenon with the same two percentages of 96.4% and 3.6% holds also for the relation between strokes and characters in the Chinese language although English and Chinese are two distinctly different language systems. The common construction pattern originates from the log-normal distributions of frequencies of words or characters, which can be understood by the joint effect of both the Weber-Fechner law in psychophysics and the principle of maximum entropy in information theory.