  The importance of statistical patterns of language has been debated over
decades. Although Zipf's law is perhaps the most popular case, recently,
Menzerath's law has begun to be involved. Menzerath's law manifests in
language, music and genomes as a tendency of the mean size of the parts to
decrease as the number of parts increases in many situations. This statistical
regularity emerges also in the context of genomes, for instance, as a tendency
of species with more chromosomes to have a smaller mean chromosome size. It has
been argued that the instantiation of this law in genomes is not indicative of
any parallel between language and genomes because (a) the law is inevitable and
(b) non-coding DNA dominates genomes. Here mathematical, statistical and
conceptual challenges of these criticisms are discussed. Two major conclusions
are drawn: the law is not inevitable and languages also have a correlate of
non-coding DNA. However, the wide range of manifestations of the law in and
outside genomes suggests that the striking similarities between non-coding DNA
and certain linguistics units could be anecdotal for understanding the
recurrence of that statistical law.
