sh_ and ch_ compose the same words

[ReneZ]

No problem, let the discussion continue...

I have no satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon, but the artefacts from varying page length are important, and I think sufficiently demonstrated. Any pair of words that occur consistently throughout a meaningful text will show this type of correlation if the text is cut in unequal pieces and the correlation is computed over these pieces.

One can normalise in several different ways. Two have been used here. A third would be to concatenate all the text and then cut it in equal pieces, but this may be less useful, since there is evidently some folio-dependence in the MS text.

For one thing this phenomenon shows that trying to turn this text into something meaningful by simple substitution will not work. No language behaves like this. This thread is specifically about the similarity of ch_ and sh_ words, but similar things is happening for other pairs, for example words including k vs. t etc.

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The plot I get for chedy / shedy seems to me reasonably close (though not identical) to the one computed by Rene on the basis of Nablator's spreadsheet. I have included {0,0} pages. The red line is y=x.

I think that nablator's spreadsheet was based on the Takeshi Takahashi transcription. If you used another one, the difference would be explained.