The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

For yet it's striking that for almost all words where “sh” precedes a sequence of glyphs—a sequence that could also be preceded by “ch,” “k,” or even “t”—‘sh’ is always the most common, and the order of the glyphs “ch,” “k,” (and “t”) remains similar.

Yes, I understand now that your claim is not about the Sh-qo attraction itself, but the fact that the attraction is stronger for Sh than for Ch or k.

But in those few words that you showed, the ratio of frequencies "qo after ShXXX" over "qo after ChXXX" varies enormoulsy depending on the XXX -- from ~5 for Sheo and Sheor to almost 1 for Sheedy, Sheody, and Shy.

And the same variation of the ratio is seen when comparing ShXXX to kXXX.  In fact ko attracts qo more strongly than Sho ...

That is language, not structure... 

But indeed it is intriguing that that similar words like Shedy, Sheey, Sheedy and Sheody have similar statistics (like that one).   I have a possible explanation; please stay tuned. 

But before calling these similarities "not natural", we should actually check whether they are indeed absent in Mandarin in pinyin.  But not using a correct pinyin text, but instead a text that a non-Chinese could produce if he heard dictation in Mandarin and tried to write down the pinyin, without understanding half the words...

In fact, similar words correlating with similar meanings, which in turn could lead to similar ulage, it a feature of many Indo-European and Smeitic languages.  Even in English, I bet that the words "this" and "that" and "these" and "those" will have similar statistics...

All the best , --stolfi