On the ‘Stickiness’ of Words. A Comparative Language Study Screening the Internet for English, German, French and Latin Phrases

Abstract Language, one of the defining attributes of Homo sapiens, not only deploys as a chain of words. Rather, words group together in a non-random way to form phrases. Here, the world-wide web was searched for idiomatic expressions in three living and one extinct language: 1102 English, 1183 German, 1138 French and 1128 Latin phrases distributed into three categories, with high, middle and low frequencies. High-frequency phrases such as in addition to and as a matter of fact constituted 49.5% of all English phrases, but only 9.0% of the French and 2.5% of the German ones. The middle-frequency category with classical idioms such as a bitter pill or carved in stone comprised 34.9% of the English, 33.0% of the French, and 24.9% of the German phrases. Most French and German phrases were of low frequency. Latin phrases were found as often as French and more often than German ones in the world-wide web, and exhibited a frequency distribution similar to those of French and German. Frequency distributions yielded three main categories around similar maxima for all four languages, with differing relative proportions. The internet may prove useful for the quantitative comparison of languages.