The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 3 : It's not just "ed"

[oshfdk]

I'm not sure I understand the significance of sorting. Imagine, that ho and ed are somewhat mutually exclusive (for example, they are a spelling variation, one scribe writes "color" the other "colour", but sometimes they are mindlessly coping from each other's drafts and use the opposite spelling). Imagine the book speaks about colors a lot. This would lead to overabundance of trigram "our" on some pages and "lor" on other pages. You can sort them by "our"/"lor" and of course you will get a smooth transition. This doesn't mean anything for the order of writing. Whenever you sort many random numbers taken from a range, you will get a smooth curve. The below is a graph produced by creating 200 tuples (A, B) where A+B = 100, but otherwise the numbers are random, and then sorting by A/B.

   

Overall, I agree with Jorge_Stolfi that "statistics of characters (bigrams, trigrams, etc.) can be only puzzling, not illuminating." Without some underlying model explaining the data, the data is curious but mostly doesn't lead anywhere.

I remember seeing a past study or post (something with charts) about which character combinations are antagonistic (like ho and ed, statistically mutually exclusive in the MS) and I remember there were more pairs like this. Does anyone remember what post/article that could be?