Some good ppints there Clay and I thought that there had been some work done
on the canon (particularly the Sanskrit versions and I expected the Pali as
well) at least as far as staistical analysis from the point of view of
dating, authorship, stylistics etc - will try to dig back through my memory
and see what pops out - would almost certainly be in the German scholarly
literature.

Cheers

Robert Didham

>From: Clay Collier <spasemunki@...>
>Reply-To: Pali@yahoogroups.com
>To: Pali@yahoogroups.com
>Subject: Re: [Pali] most common words?
>Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 14:40:58 -0800
>
>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
> >
> >
> >
> >
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