set the "alphabet." This is not to be confused with the "language source," which represents the set of all words that can be constructed from said alphabet. As experienced right from early school, not all characters and words are born equal. Some characters and words are more likely to be used; some are more rarely seen. In European tongues, the use of characters such as X or Z is relatively seldom, while A or E are comparatively more frequent, a fact that we will analyze further down. However, the statistics of characters and words are also pretty much context- dependent. Indeed, it is clear that a political speech, a financial report, a mortgage contract, an inventory of botanical species, a thesis on biochemistry, or a submarine's operating manual (etc.), may exhibit statistics quite different from ordinary texts! This observation does not diminish the fact that, within a language source, (the set of all possible words, or character arrangements therein), words and characters are not all treated equal. To reach the fundamentals through a high-level analysis of language, let us consider just the basic character statistics. A first observation is that in any language, the probability distribution of characters (PDF), as based on any literature survey, is not strictly unique. Indeed, the PDF depends not only on the type of literature surveyed (e.g., newspapers, novels, dictionaries, tech- nical reports) but also on the contextual epoch. Additionally, in any given language practiced worldwide, one may expect significant qualitative differences. The Continen- tal and North-American variations of English, or the French used in Belgium, Quebec, or Africa, are not strictly the same, owing to the rich variety of local words, expressions, idioms, and literature. A possible PDF for English alphabetical characters, which was realized in 1942,8 is shown in Fig. 4.2. We first observe from the figure that the discrete PDF nearly obeys exponential law. As expected, the space character (sp) is the most frequent (18.7%). It is 