Comment by bradrn
5 years ago
> There's a rule in linguistics, that the more often a word is used, the shorter it will be
I’m really interested in linguistics, but I’ve never heard of such a rule. Could you give a source please? I’d be curious to know if this is true.
(A striking counterexample I ran into just yesterday: the Urim word for ‘head’ is tukŋunakŋ, and ‘we (incl.)’ is mentepm-. I don’t think this is because Urim people avoid talking about heads or groups of people. That being said, it’s tricky concluding anything from a sample size of n=1.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brevity_law
This is just a statistical tendency. It doesn’t license the inference that any given long word is rarely used.
Interesting — I’ll have to look into this. Thank you!
Hence Russian has a concise word for elephant, slon, and a three-syllable word for hen, kuritza.