Re: VMs: RE: King Tut Word Game, or the EKT Hypothesis

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Gabriel,

At 14:15 10/07/2003 +0100, Gabriel wrote:
> On Thursday 10 July 2003 12:30, Nick Pelling wrote:
> > - languages are inherently
> > redundant and broadly self-similar, which gives rise to many of the
> > statistical relationships evident in normal texts.
>
> What do you mean by "self-similar"?

Well... sharing internal commonalities within a web of words - letter 
patterns, morphemes, call them what you will. :-)

Basically, I was trying to express the idea that each language is formed 
from a web of inter-related jigsaw pieces - not just in terms of 
conjugation, declension, and prefixes, but also in roots - which also often 
have pronunciational (letter adjacency) and use-related structural 
similarities (sequence rules, so that words only in orders certain 
typically appear). :-)

But, all in all, I thought "self-similar" was a bit more concise. :-)

For a language like English, analysing the stats skims the surface of this 
kind of deep pool - though what the comparable stats for artificial 
languages (for example, Lojban) might indicate, I don't know. I'm happy to 
leave that for others to work out... :-o

For the VMS, we often talk about stats, but stats only try to capture a 
picture of behavioural tendencies within a particular context, whether 
that's letter-to-letter, glyph-to-glyph, word-to-word, line-to-line, 
page-to-page, section-to-section, or whatever. These are, again, completely 
dependent on the transcription used.

Perhaps someone ought to consider trying to categorise all the known 
statistical assaults into an overall structure or taxonomy of some sort? 
Deducing which tests haven't been carried out might be just as useful as 
knowing which tests have.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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