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The present study examines the dynamics of the kanji combinations that form common (or general) and proper nouns in Japanese. The following three results were obtained. First, the degree of distribution results from two similar processes which are based on a steady-state of birth-and-death processes with different birth and death rates, resulting in a positive negative binomial distribution with the proper nouns and in a positive Waring distribution with common nouns. Second, all rank-frequency distributions follow the negative hypergeometric distribution used very frequently in ranking problems. Third, the building of kanji compounds follows a dissortative strategy. The higher the outdegree of a kanji, the more it prefers kanji with lower indegrees. A linear dependence can be observed with common nouns, whereas the relationship between compounded kanji is rather curvilinear with proper nouns. The actual analytical expression is not yet known.
This paper deals with the distribution of word length in short native mythological and historical Eskimo narrative texts. To my knowledge, no Eskimo‐Aleut data have been the object of quantitative linguistic investigation so far. Due to the strong linguistic and Stylistic homogeneity of the examined texts it was assumed that these texts can be subsumed under a single law of word length distribution, if word length distribution of a text is considered as a function of certain of its properties, such as author, language, and genre. So far, word length distribution in texts of a wide variety of languages and genres has been demonstrated to follow distributions of the compound Poisson family of discrete probability distributions. In view of the morphological idiosyncrasies of the Eskimo language in general, which are responsible for an unusually high mean word length of about 4.5 to 5.2 syllables per word in the texts, it is interesting to see whether Eskimo texts show a significantly different behaviour with respect to word length. The results demonstrate that the Eskimo data employed in this study can be fitted well by the Hyperpoisson distribution. Two further discrete probability distributions will be deduced from certain morphology‐based assumptions about Eskimo. It turns out that most of the Eskimo data can be fitted by these two distributions. The question to what extent these results point to a more grammar‐oriented theory of word length is also discussed.