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I'm not sure if this is an "answer" to your question, but I recall seeing somewhere that someone had shown that if you create a document by selecting the characters a...z plus a space character with uniform frequency then the "words" of such a document have a frequency distribution that follows Zipf's Law. (A little anecdote: when I was an undergraduate, I took a course on "Inductive Logic" given by Zipf. I recall being rather annoyed because he spent a lot of the time lecturing about "his" law and having us form groups that as part of our class work collected statistics to test it :-)