08-11-2016, 09:26 PM
Well, if you count line breaks as spaces, then a block of text with n words will contain n-1 spaces, which means you have approximately one space per word in the larger blocks of text. Labels, on the other hand, will have few to no spaces (unless we count the divisions between labels as spaces).
So, in order for a letter to be more frequent than a space in the main text, it would have to occur more than once per word on average.
I could imagine that if you had a language with many long words and a relatively low number of phonemes that you might be able to find a character more frequent than a space (assuming 1 character = 1 segmental phoneme), though I don't know if such a language exists.
If you don't require that one character represents a phoneme, then it would be easy to come up with a contrived system that would have characters more common than spaces. For instance, if you were to replace every instance of o in the VMS with ooo, then o would probably be more common than a space.
So, in order for a letter to be more frequent than a space in the main text, it would have to occur more than once per word on average.
I could imagine that if you had a language with many long words and a relatively low number of phonemes that you might be able to find a character more frequent than a space (assuming 1 character = 1 segmental phoneme), though I don't know if such a language exists.
If you don't require that one character represents a phoneme, then it would be easy to come up with a contrived system that would have characters more common than spaces. For instance, if you were to replace every instance of o in the VMS with ooo, then o would probably be more common than a space.