Lipogrammatic text

[MarcoP]

Certainly, especially with a frequent vowel like [e], English would take a serious hit. What I mean is that if we'd look at the result as a new language (so not specifically spot the differences with normal English), any stat you can think of would be well within the range of normal linguistic behavior.

Hi Koen,
I agree. The text in the actual examples is perfectly grammatical and of course it behaves like language. The lipogram exercise is only interesting if you produce a correct text; anything else would be trivial and doesn't even qualify as a lipogram.

A kind of statistics that is obviously affected is the list of the most frequent words. I compared You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with an extract by Dumas of a similar length. Four of the 10 top words by Dumas are in the top 20 by Perec. The exceptions are:

• 5 words that contain 'e'
  
• 'vous'
  

The difference between Currier A and B is much more dramatic (only daiin is consistenlty present among the high-ranking words).
   

Here I have plotted conditional entropy vs MATTR200 for the files in Brian Cham's corpus. I also included Currier A and B from the VMS (ZL transliteration) and the Perec and Dumas files. This shows that lipograms have no significant effect on these two measures.