Serbian Mediaeval Law on wills and succession

A Natural Law of Succession

Consider the following problem. You are given an alphabet of k distinct symbols and are told that the i symbol occurred exactly ni times in the past. On the basis of this information alone, you must now estimate the conditional probability that the next symbol will be i. In this report, we present a new solution to this fundamental problem in statistics and demonstrate that our solution outperf...

Roman-Dutch law in modern South African succession law

A Natural Law of Succession 1

Consider the problem of multinomial estimation. You are given an alphabet of distinct symbols and are told the frequency with which each symbol occurred in the past. On the basis of this information alone, you must now estimate the symbol probabilities. In this report, we present a new solution to this fundamental problem in statistics and demonstrate that our solution outperforms standard appr...

Parameter interpretation of the Menzerath law: evidence from Serbian

The law-like relation between word and syllable length as part of the Menzerath law has been corrobated empirically in many different languages. As to South Slavic languages, we have the studies by Gajić (1950) and Grzybek (1999) on Croatian, and by Grzybek (2000) on Slovene. The aim of the present paper is first of all to provide empirical evidence of the Menzerath law for another South Slavic...

Dispensing with Wills' Act Formalities for Substantively Valid Wills