glyph [d] as a substitute for [p] and [f]

[geoffreycaveney]

If that is true, no conclusion or implication would reveal us anything. If you have a suggestion I would love to hear that.

A quick-and-dirty count gives the following results:

To remove formatting from TT_ivtff_v0a.txt in paragraphs:
grep ",.P" TT_ivtff_v0a.txt | cut -c18- | sed "s/<->/./g;s/<$>//g;s/ //g;s/\.$//g"| grep "^[pf]" > ttpfstart.txt
grep ",.P" TT_ivtff_v0a.txt | cut -c18- | sed "s/<->/./g;s/<$>//g;s/ //g;s/\.$//g"| grep "[pf]" > ttpf.txt
grep ",.P" TT_ivtff_v0a.txt | cut -c18- | sed "s/<->/./g;s/<$>//g;s/ //g;s/\.$//g"| grep -v "[pf]" > ttnopf.txt

To compute the frequency (as a percentage) of "d" among EVA characters including "." in paragraphs:
awk -F "d" "{ll += length-1; cc += NF-1} END {print 100*cc/ll}" < ttnopf.txt
5.81984
awk -F "d" "{ll += length-1; cc += NF-1} END {print 100*cc/ll}" < ttpf.txt
6.21357
awk -F "d" "{ll += length-1; cc += NF-1} END {print 100*cc/ll}" < ttpfstart.txt
6.24086

(length-1 because I am using these UNIX tools on Windows: every line has a cr beside lf.)

These small frequency variations (5.8% in lines without p or f vs 6.2% in lines with p or f) do not tell us much, but they certainly do not suggest that d is a good candidate for a substitution of p and f.

A more plausible hypothesis IMHO than a substitution would be that p and f are inserted (no idea why, and reading discussions about "Neal keys" did not help). The (weak) evidence for this is that removing p and f very often yields words that exist elsewhere in the VMs.

After removal of p and f in ttpf.txt the frequency of d is 6.45%.

As I wrote yesterday in the other thread about my theory, I want to express my belated thanks and appreciation to nablator for performing this very helpful statistical analysis. It clearly shows that [d] is not more frequent in lines without [p] or [f].

However, I still believe [d] may be a substitute for [p] and [f]. I believe the explanation may lie in the author's use of alliteration and assonance. The sounds that these letters represent may simply tend to appear very frequently clustered together on the same lines, as an expression of this alliteration and assonance. In this case, [d] may be a substitute for [p] and [f], and still [d] may appear just as frequently or even perhaps more frequently on lines with [p] or [f] than on lines without [p] or [f].

This idea also suggests that the author had a preference for employing alliteration and assonance with these particular sounds in the first lines of paragraphs. A possible reason for this would be that the author simply preferred the aesthetic appearance of the tall, elaborate, and ornate characters [p] and [f] on the prominent first lines, and so was inspired to choose their sounds for alliteration and assonance on these lines more so than elsewhere.

ChenZheChina, I am not trying to ignore your comment either, thank you for the comment and the question, I will do my best to get back to you and answer as soon as I can.

Geoffrey