About the generation of similar words

[quimqu]

That is perhaps unexpected, and raises the question: what is the reason that the variant word appeared at that point?

Was it because it is a variant of a previous core word?
Or was it because it is a relatively frequent word that is therefore likely to appear anyway?

The latter has to be the preferred case.

(or the text is backwards...)

René, in the earlier version of the analysis, I defined the “core” simply as the first word of the burst. Under that operational definition, the first word was indeed usually rarer than the other members. But the newer analysis suggests that this first word is often just a temporal anchor, not the best candidate for the actual source form.

When I compare alternative core definitions, the picture changes. The generative core is more frequent than the other burst members in about 72% of bursts, and the frequency core in about 86%. More importantly, in the inferred parent-child graph, the parent is more frequent than the child in about 33.5% of cases and equally frequent in about 41.6%, so in roughly 75% of the links the parent is at least as frequent as the child.

So the old result still holds descriptively for the first word, but I would no longer interpret it causally. The newer evidence is more consistent with the idea that the scribe often generated forms from already established, relatively frequent words on the page.