<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Previous studies based on English, Russian and Ch inese corpora show that the average word length in texts grows steadily across centuries. These findings are in accordance with our results: the average word length in Arabic texts also grows during the analysed time span (8th century to the first half of the 20th century). Our paper shows the detailed statistics of the word length distribution century by century. The dynamics of the average word length correlates with the dynamics of the average word distribution entropy, which encourages an explanation of the phenomenon based on the Shannonian theory of communication.</p></abstract>

Previous studies based on English, Russian and Ch inese corpora show that the average word length in texts grows steadily across centuries. These findings are in accordance with our results: the average word length in Arabic texts also grows during the analysed time span (8th century to the first half of the 20th century). Our paper shows the detailed statistics of the word length distribution century by century. The dynamics of the average word length correlates with the dynamics of the average word distribution entropy, which encourages an explanation of the phenomenon based on the Shannonian theory of communication.

Average Word Length from the Diachronic Perspective: The Case of Arabic

Linguistic Frontiers

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

{"article-title":"Average Word Length from the Diachronic Perspective: The Case of Arabic"}

Previous studies based on English, Russian and Ch inese corpora show that the average word length in texts grows steadily across centuries. These findings are...

Average Word Length from the Diachronic Perspective: The Case of Arabic

Published Online: Aug 02, 2019

Page range: 81 - 89

Received: Nov 22, 2018

Accepted: Dec 08, 2018

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/lf-2018-0007

Keywords
Arabic, word length dynamics, lexicon dynamics, diachronic corpus, entropy, lexical richness

© 2018 Jiří Milička, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Average Word Length from the Diachronic Perspective: The Case of Arabic

Published Online: Aug 02, 2019

Page range: 81 - 89

Received: Nov 22, 2018

Accepted: Dec 08, 2018

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/lf-2018-0007

KeywordsArabic, word length dynamics, lexicon dynamics, diachronic corpus, entropy, lexical richness

© 2018 Jiří Milička, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
Arabic, word length dynamics, lexicon dynamics, diachronic corpus, entropy, lexical richness