Re: Diringer and 's "imprecision" and copy(-daiin) was: intercultural artefact

["Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 26 Jan 2002 at 0:56, Jacques Guy wrote:

> Does anyone care to comment on this hypothesis before I test
> it?

Perhaps this is irrelevant, but something I was confused about was that the ratio of number of copies at n 
distance to words copied was constant (about 4.5 for Jacques sample), except the first few distances. 
As Jacques is pointing out, it is those few instances the ones one should be concentrating on.

But wouldn't the statistics be somehow influenced by the word frequency distribution as well? 
Aren't common words like "the, and, for, to" the ones that are the main culprits of not being able to 
appear repeated?


Cheers,

Gabriel