Mykyta the Fox and networks of language

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Ukrainian texts to reveal statistical properties of word distributions and models language as a complex network, demonstrating scale-free and small-world characteristics with implications for language evolution theories.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of Ukrainian language networks, combining frequency-rank distribution and complex network models, highlighting their scale-free and small-world properties.

Findings

Word frequency distributions follow Zipf's law with an exponent of about 1.

Ukrainian language networks are strongly correlated, scale-free, and exhibit small-world properties.

Different network representations reveal diverse structural characteristics.

Abstract

The results of quantitative analysis of word distribution in two fables in Ukrainian by Ivan Franko: "Mykyta the Fox" and "Abu-Kasym's slippers" are reported. Our study consists of two parts: the analysis of frequency-rank distributions and the application of complex networks theory. The analysis of frequency-rank distributions shows that the text sizes are enough to observe statistical properties. The power-law character of these distributions (Zipf's law) holds in the region of rank variable r=20 - 3000 with an exponent $\alpha\simeq 1$. This substantiates the choice of the above texts to analyse typical properties of the language complex network on their basis. Besides, an applicability of the Simon model to describe non-asymptotic properties of word distributions is evaluated. In describing language as a complex network, usually the words are associated with nodes, whereas one may give different meanings to the network links. This results in different network representations. In the second part of the paper, we give different representations of the language network and perform comparative analysis of their characteristics. Our results demonstrate that the language network of Ukrainian is a strongly correlated scale-free small world. Empirical data obtained may be useful for theoretical description of language evolution.