Interchangeable ch/sh and k/t characters

[MarcoP]

This might be of interest, since I’ve been working on this and had just put it together in connection with von Stolfi’s thread.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The graphic shows how often a “qo” follows each glyph cluster (not token!)

It’s clearly evident that the glyphs k / t and ch / sh before glyphs of the E-family are followed by “qo” with varying frequency before glyphs of the E-family.

   

The glyphs have, so to speak, a long-range effect. 

Another interesting aspect of this graph is that they are always arranged in the same order within their respective groups.

That is, t < k < ch < sh

So t always has the weakest attraction to “qo,” followed by k, ch, and sh, which always have the strongest.

Thank you, JoJo_Jost!
Sticking to the thread’s topic is a big thing by itself, these days, but you also add new fascinating evidence to the subject.

I have replicated your results with reasonable accuracy, so these numbers appear to be reliable (with the usual small fluctuations due to transliteration, preprocessing details etc).

Here are some unreliable thoughts, I am not sure that they make sense. Your analysis certainly deserves further investigation:

I guess that come of the consistency in your table might be seen as a consequence of “dialects”: e.g. in Q13 “qo” and “-edy” are very frequent, while “eody” is almost entirely absent. Things like these may help understand why the -edy line gets high numbers and the -eody line gets lower numbers.
I don’t think the entire pattern you mention (t < k < ch < sh) can be explained in a similar way. This seems only possible for some individual cases, e.g. the large difference between t and k for -eody: this suffix is typical of Pharma, where k is exceptionally more frequent than t.

Of course, it is not clear that the dialects are “causing” these numbers, e.g. it could be that there is some phenomenon that causes both the apparent different dialects and the consistency of the table.

I also tried to understand if Feaster’s left-right distributions might provide some perspective into this (e.g. sh and qo having similar line-position preferences), but I couldn’t spot any clear pattern.

It’s also interesting that the percentages in your table span a limited range: they do successfully differentiate ch from sh, but we are still talking about preferences and the table confirms that the two benches behave similarly, leading to similar contacts with the following word. The two gallows behave even more similarly to each other, though the small differences follow the interesting arrangement you pointed out.