The Dimension of Time in Language Statistics

Abstract

There are two areas of statistics, both dealing with small and very small units which have been, more or less, neglected by statisticians: the area of small material particles and the area of the small units of communication. Paraphrasing W. Ostwald’s remark about Colloid Chemistry, as quoted in the headline of this Section, we can here fitly speak of regions of lost dimensions of statistics. With a few exceptions, statisticians were remarkably incurious about the statistics of particulate matter, that is, the region of sizes between 10 and 10^-5 cm, although physicists have found the study of the statistics of the smaller and smallest particles extremely important. Similarly, the investigation of the ‘particles’ of communication by language, such as words, phonemes, letters etc., have not attracted much attention on the part of statisticians (Yule being an exception), although communication engineers and linguists have made the study of these universes from their own angle part of their respective branches of knowledge. And yet they are interesting as statistical universes from both the practical and theoretical angle. Apart from the present writer’s treatise on small particle statistics for the first area [8], and his books on mathematical linguistics for the second [16,18,20], no attempt has been made to delineate the statistics which are appropriate for these fields.