Yup, this is a demonstration of Zipf's Law, which affects all human languages: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Yup, this is a demonstration of Zipf's Law, which affects all human languages: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law Moser has been discussed to death in the past, his article is pretty exaggerated to say the least. I think it's worth keeping in mind that for most of history, Chinese referred to a writing system that was shared between many different languages, each with different pronunciations, coming from different places (what is now modern China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan), so the writing system was a script designed around semantic meaning, not sound. This also lets it get used in Kanji where words may have multiple readings (let's not even get into how crazy that is). Now that mandarin is de-facto "Chinese", the writing system no longer serves its purpose, and in fact a lot of the character simplifications made in the 20th century make radical substitutions based on sound, further complicating things.