Currier A and B

[Emma May Smith]

That seems to be not in the least part caused by that dy itself is heavily shifted towards Currier B. 82,6% of all dy occurences fall into Currier B.

And ed is mostly used in edy.

The [dy] occurrences in A (800) are mostly the trigrams [ody] (430) and [ldy] (115), and standalone [dy] (125). Compared with [edy], these other occurrences are much more similar in A and B. So [dy] seems like a normal part of both languages, but for some reason its combination with [e] really goes crazy in B.

Now, one of my theories posits that [y] and [a] are somehow linked, and the stats for the [ed] phenomenon seem to bear that out. Out of 5,000 instances of [ed]: about 4150 (83%) are [edy], about 520 (11%) are [eda], and about 200 (4%) occur at the end of words. Also, 98% of [edy] and 93% of [eda] occur in Currier B. Whatever is causing [edy] seems to also be causing [eda]. The simplest explanation is that [y] and [a] are variants.

Also, another one of my theories is that [y] is often deleted medially when followed by [d]. Thus the bigram [ed] is caused by a word ending [ey] having [dy] added to the end: [ey + dy = eydy = edy]. The same would happen if a word ended [chy] or [shy] and had [dy] added. And this is what we see: [chdy] is 91% language B and [shdy] is 90% language B. These trigrams, though less common, as part of the same phenomenon.

My theory would predict that Currier A should see higher rate of words ending [ey], [chy], and [shy]. While it seems to be true for [chy] and [shy], it isn't for [ey]. It would seem that [e] as a whole is more common in Currier B than A, and that more than one factor is changing to make the stats what they are.