As part of my writing, and because I’m a data person, I always wonder about the structure of language. In grad school I had to write a simple search engine (similar to Google) and learned about taking documents apart and determining word frequencies. Just recently, though, I learned about a neat concept called Zipf’s Law and how it relates to, among other things, word distribution in both written works and entire languages.
For reference, I got hooked on this idea based on two YouTube videos:
How Some Words Get Forgetted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFW7orQsBuo
The Zipf Mysteryhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE
For the most part, this is just a curiosity for me. I’m not planning to change my writing based on the statistical characteristics. Where I thought this would be most useful is in world building when there are new or evolved languages.
I have a world I have been building since high school. I’ve worked on it extensively, creating great detail for about a thousand years of its history. Where the great Professor Tolkien built his world to work with languages, my world was built to play with the spread and change of religious beliefs. Later, I looked into the economics of the world as well.
One of the things that I wondered about as a background sort of thing, was the changes of the languages. The world starts out as our current world after a severe cataclysm (an extremely unoriginal idea). Different peoples meet and their languages have to blend and then change over the thousand years. I understood that the culture of these people would determine which words were important and which were common, daily words.
The concepts in these two videos, and subsequent readings, made me start wondering about the word distributions of my peoples. For example, most of the thousand years involved an ongoing war in one region. How many of their most common words would have to do with conflict and defense, as opposed to simple food production? How would these distributions compare with the distributions of people on the other side of the continent where war was less of an issue?
Honestly, I probably will not go through the trouble to develop the languages of these people for my writing. The stories would be written in my Iowan English anyway, so at most I would just pick a few terms to translate for color. Even so, I may want to consider how the characters phrase certain ideas to reflect their underlying language.