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

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

On 26 Jan 2002 at 20:33, Jacques Guy wrote:
> Perhaps, and perhaps not. It's just another shot in the
> dark. I am more puzzled by the distribution of v, iv, and
> iiv, which never occur word-initially. Likewise, I don't
> remember gallows occurring word-finally.

I had a look at the duplets and found

f_ 30
k_ 87
t_ 76
p_ 33

Some of these may be letters in sequences, but there are word final gallows for sure.

> I still have  doubts that spaces are word separations, BTW. 

If you remove all spaces in a text in an unknown (to you) language, can you guess what is the central tendency of the token length distribution? (I 
am talking about the modal token length).
I think one can and that is what I did with the spectral analysis in the cryptologia paper. The value one gets for the space-less vms is practically 
the same that if one counts the strings delimited with spaces as tokens.
Not only that, but you can also see other periodic structures, like verse lengths (if the source is poetry).

Cheers,

Gabriel