While the frequency distribution of Chinese characters is known to deviate markedly from Zipf's law, the author found the frequency distribution of Chinese words to follow Zipf's law. The similarity of the distribution of Chinese characters to that of Hebrew and English is also considered.
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References
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D. Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Chapter 15) (1987) 86-87.
2.
Kai-hua Zhao , Physics nomenclature in China, American Journal of Physics58(5) (May 1990) 449-452.
3.
Data provided by Mr Gavriel Birenboim, Academy of Hebrew Language, Jerusalem, Israel.
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P. McCaldon and P. Agros, Oligopeptide biases in protein sequences and their use in predicting coding regions in nucleotide sequences, Proteins4 (1988) 99-122.
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Ching Y. Suen , Computational Studies of the Most Frequent Chinese Words and Sounds (World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte Ltd, 1986).
