Hi Stephen-
I'd thought of the same question earlier, but a little searching over the
years hasn't turned up any leads to anyone having carried out such a
project. I initially was drawn to the idea by looking at some work on
classical cryptography, and its applications to deciphering incomplete
texts, or untranslated scripts. As a result, tables of character/letter
frequency were the first thing that I thought of, but I think that there is
a lot of other statistical information that might be interesting to pull out
of the canon. I imagine that if you have a statistical 'picture' of what a
particular body of text looks like in terms of the relative use of
compounds, vocabulary, archaic or under-used declentions, etc., you have an
additional piece of information to use in trying to assess if a given text
is in the same style. I would imagine that philologists would have given
some thought to this sort of method- not sure if it is considered useful or
not, or to what extent the approach has been tried with other languages. Any
linguists have any insight to offer?

Clay Collier

On 11/2/05, Stephen Hodge <s.hodge@...> wrote:
>
> Dear Friends,
>
> To add to the request of James Miner fior the 100 most common Pali words,
> I
> had been thinking recently of asking a somewhat similar question: Has a
> statistical count been carried out for Pali ? I have a useful word
> frequency program (Hermetic Word Frequency Counter 3.07) but the
> difficulty
> to use it for Pali / Sanskrit is the large number of compounds and the
> words
> coalesced through sandhi. Given these problems, I can't see how it could
> be
> done -- so in the end I didn't bother to ask, though such a word frequency
>
> list would be useful for pedagogical purposes.
>
> Best wishes,
> Stephen Hodge
>
>
>
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> Paa.li-Parisaa - The Pali Collective
> [Homepage] http://www.tipitaka.net
> [Files] http://www.geocities.com/paligroup/
> [Send Message] pali@yahoogroups.com
> Yahoo! Groups members can set their delivery options to daily digest or
> web only.
>
>
>
> SPONSORED LINKS
> Pali<http://groups.yahoo.com/gads?t=ms&k=Pali&w1=Pali&w2=Theravada+buddhism&w3=Beyond+belief&w4=Mormon+beliefs&w5=Tibetan+buddhism&w6=Zen+buddhism&c=6&s=113&.sig=GyEyePcJHfZpsY-GdFssvw> Theravada
> buddhism<http://groups.yahoo.com/gads?t=ms&k=Theravada+buddhism&w1=Pali&w2=Theravada+buddhism&w3=Beyond+belief&w4=Mormon+beliefs&w5=Tibetan+buddhism&w6=Zen+buddhism&c=6&s=113&.sig=fPO4yeUBBy8t0F4nXQuJGw> Beyond
> belief<http://groups.yahoo.com/gads?t=ms&k=Beyond+belief&w1=Pali&w2=Theravada+buddhism&w3=Beyond+belief&w4=Mormon+beliefs&w5=Tibetan+buddhism&w6=Zen+buddhism&c=6&s=113&.sig=NgR22WEkb0gHRJDAPUbP5Q> Mormon
> beliefs<http://groups.yahoo.com/gads?t=ms&k=Mormon+beliefs&w1=Pali&w2=Theravada+buddhism&w3=Beyond+belief&w4=Mormon+beliefs&w5=Tibetan+buddhism&w6=Zen+buddhism&c=6&s=113&.sig=SlQvf_DQhA7LQCPPqw7lEg> Tibetan
> buddhism<http://groups.yahoo.com/gads?t=ms&k=Tibetan+buddhism&w1=Pali&w2=Theravada+buddhism&w3=Beyond+belief&w4=Mormon+beliefs&w5=Tibetan+buddhism&w6=Zen+buddhism&c=6&s=113&.sig=AYNn_WFJ1K_p6VBpiYfSbg> Zen
> buddhism<http://groups.yahoo.com/gads?t=ms&k=Zen+buddhism&w1=Pali&w2=Theravada+buddhism&w3=Beyond+belief&w4=Mormon+beliefs&w5=Tibetan+buddhism&w6=Zen+buddhism&c=6&s=113&.sig=mnV1ApI1F2QNSeDb3zeCNA>
> ------------------------------
> YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
>
>
> - Visit your group "Pali <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Pali>" on
> the web.
> - To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> Pali-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com<Pali-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com?subject=Unsubscribe>
> - Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of
> Service <http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/>.
>
>
> ------------------------------
>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]