Number of syllables distribution

[Koen G]

Emma, I now tried to "automatically" apply your complete method of vowel selecting to the entire word list, as you described:

[a, y, o] are vowels and every instance of those indicates a syllable; [e] sequences are vowels if not immediately followed by [a, y, o]; and [ch, sh] count as vowels if not immediately followed by an [e] sequence or [a, y, o];

The method isn't flawless (but neither is manual parsing), but this is how I did it, all with find-and-replace:

1) All [a, y, o] become 1.
2) The sequence [e1] now means there was an [e] followed by [a, y, o]. Since you don't want the [e] to be a vowel in this case, I replaced [eeee1], [eee1] etc. by 1, effectively eliminating the [e]-sequences from vowel counts only when followed by [a, y, o].
3) Remaining [e]-sequences are replaced by 1. I wasn't sure whether you take e-sequences to be single vowels or rather vowel sequences. I took each sequence to be one vowel, not each [e].
4) Benches followed by 1 are eliminated by replacing the whole sequence with 1.
5) Remaining benches are replaced by 1.
6) Everything else is eliminated.
7) Paste in excel and use COUNTIF function.
8) Share on forum in overly complicated way.


Additionally, I made a calculation of what I think could be "maximal" vowel usage: [a, y, o] are vowels, anything that is benched or a bench is a vowel, any "e"-sequence is one vowel.

   

So in the image above, the blue is Latin for comparison. Yellow is my "max vowel" calculation. Red is my attempt to automatically count syllables following Emma's rules.

What stands out is that Emma's system results in a relatively large amount of one- and two-syllable types, with a huge drop after three syllables. This is in line with what Emma describes in her post. 

Removing the conditional status of benches and e-clusters tends to bring the results much closer to Latin. Of course, we don't know if this is desirable or not, it's just an observation.