09-04-2019, 02:26 PM
I'm not sure the properties are well argued either.
It's true that punctuation is usually at the ends of words (and sometimes the ends of lines), but there might not be any punctuation.
It's true that capitals are usually at the beginnings of words, but first you have to be sure you are assessing the beginnings of words. If the spaces are not literal, and if text wraps from one line to the next without punctuation (which happens often in medieval text), then the statistics are not actually based on words, they are based on VMS tokens, which might be something quite different from words.
It's true that punctuation is usually at the ends of words (and sometimes the ends of lines), but there might not be any punctuation.
It's true that capitals are usually at the beginnings of words, but first you have to be sure you are assessing the beginnings of words. If the spaces are not literal, and if text wraps from one line to the next without punctuation (which happens often in medieval text), then the statistics are not actually based on words, they are based on VMS tokens, which might be something quite different from words.