Average Word Length from the Diachronic Perspective

The Case of Arabic

Abstract

Previous studies based on English, Russian and Chinese 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.