[Article] Testable signatures on VMS structure

[eggyk]

And, finally, statistics are a property of a text, not of a language.  There is no such thing as "the frequency of 'e' in English" or 'the most common Engish word'.   Someone wrote a whole novel in English without using 'e' even once -- and readers don't notice unless they are told.  In a materia medica the most common word may well be "take" or "cures", and the word "the" may hardly be used... 

All the best, --stolfi

Of course there are statistics for a language, and those statistics can be useful for comparing languages. "the frequency of 'e' in english" is effectively saying "the frequency of 'e' in english texts on average". Just because a certain text can be deliberately changed from the norm, does not mean the norm doesn't exist. There is still a distribution of frequencies from all existing texts, and those meaningfully differ from language to language. 

Put another way, the frequency of the word written "t h e" is significantly higher in an average english text compared with that of an average french text. This is a clear statistical feature of those languages, even if there are outliers in both.