Bigram = phoneme theory (language agnostic)

[-JKP-]

Lately I have been trying to figure out why the bigram to reverse bigram ratio is so unbalanced e. g. ~7000 EVA-dy and only ~200 EVA-yd.

Few common bigrams are relatively well balanced relative to their reverse: yt-ty, yk-ky, os-so.

Do you mean from the perspective of natural language?

From the perspective of natural language, syllabic languages work like this. Look at Japanese (or Indic), for example. The "alphabet" is learned as syllables.

We learn A B C D E, they learn syllables like ma, mi, mu, me, mo, ba, bi, bu, be, bo, etc. Words are constructed out of those building blocks. You wouldn't reverse them. The general idea is Yo-ko-ha-ma (for Yokohama). Note how the vowel follows the consonant when it's broken into its component syllables. Ta-ka-ha-shi (Takahashi).


Older languages are more "pure" than modern languages in this respect. Loanwords, occupation by other nations with a different language, all these factors tend to alter the basic rules. Korean has a regular and logical structure that was slightly changed by Chinese occupation, but it is changing much more now, with the introduction of English computer terms. Instead of translating them into Korean roots, they simply change them to Korean pronunciation, thus watering down the logical structure of their base language (it all becomes memorization).