Word-length Entropies and Correlations of Natural Language Written Texts

Abstract

We study the frequency distributions and correlations of the word lengths of 10 European languages. Our findings indicate that (a) the word-length distribution of short words quantified by the mean value and the entropy distinguishes the Uralic (Finnish) corpus from the others, (b) the tails at long words, manifested in the high-order moments of the distributions, differentiate the Germanic languages (except for English) from the Romanic languages and Greek and (c) the correlations between nearby word lengths measured by the comparison of the real entropies with those of the shuffled texts are found to be smaller in the case of Germanic and Finnish languages.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to George Mikros for the fruitful discussions and support. K. K. would like to express his gratitude to the Library in the National Hellenic Research Foundation.