Herdan's law

Gustav Herdan ( born January 21, 1897 in Brno, † 16 November 1968, Bournemouth) was a lawyer, statistician and linguist.

Life

Herdan started in the winter term 1917/18 a study of law in Vienna and Prague. He earned his doctorate in 1923 at the German University in Prague. He concluded from this promotion without dissertation, because at that time no dissertations were made in this subject.

From 1933 to study especially the Chinese followed in Berlin, London ( Diploma in classical Chinese), Prague and Vienna. In 1937 he finished his studies in Vienna with a doctorate in Sinology from ( East Asian languages ​​) and English philology. He wrote to a dissertation on the topic of reduplication with the title: The reduplication of Chih Ching. There is only one specimen, which is preserved in Vienna.

In 1938 he had to because of the political situation in the emigration to England. There, he studied mathematics and statistics. From 1948 " Lecturer in Statistics" in medicine at the University of Bristol.

Importance

Herdans great importance for linguistics is that he has probably presented as a first overall presentation of Quantitative Linguistics.

An important aspect of his work is the development and review of mathematically formulated language laws ( " statistical " laws). Following on from Ferdinand de Saussure's dichotomy of langue and parole, as well as information theory and cybernetics he stands along with Pierre Guiraud and Charles Muller for the recovery of Quantitative Linguistics in the 1950 / 1960.

He focuses on a statistical basis with many issues on which he also provides extensive new data: problems of identification of anonymous authors, stylometry ( Quantitative Stylistics ), language change and language mixture, type - token ratio, word length and word frequency distributions, relationship between text length and vocabulary circumference and between stylistics and language typology.

In his works, several language laws are presented, including the Zipf ( Zipfsches law ) or Zipf - Mandelbrot distribution, Poisson distribution, log-normal distribution. This Herdan is one of the pioneers of Quantitative Linguistics.