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.

I tried to look into that claim.  Indeed for most of the XXX you listed, the frequency of q-words after shXXX is indeed higher than the same number for chXXX.  But there are many exceptions. Like for XXX = edaiin:

shedaiin    1/13 13.3%   |   chedaiin   4/30 15.6%

You may rightly say that this is just an artifact of sampling noise. Namely, if the count for shedaiin.q* was 2 instead of 1, then its q-percentage would be over 20%.

But consider the following set YYY of 100 suffixes

aiin al ckhey ckhy cthey cthy dal do dy eainy eal ear echol eckhey eckhy
ecthy ed edain edal edar edody edy ee eeal eed eedain eedy eeey eekain
eeky eeol eeoly ees eety eey efchdy ekal ekchy ekody ekor eky eo eockhey
eodaiin eody eoeed eokedy eokeedy eoky eol eoldy eopaiin eopchy eor
epchedy epchy es etshdy ey eykedy eyldy eytchdy kaiin keody keol keor ko
kol ky l ocfhy ochy ockhy odaiin odol ody oiin okalol okchey okeeody
okey okshdy oky okydy ol olalaiin oldain oldy oly or orydar otchy otoly
shdar taiin teody tol y ykchedy ysho

There are 100 distinct sh-words (1817 sh-tokens) and 71 distinct ch-words (2897 ch-tokens) with these suffixes in my VMS file.  

Excluding these 171 words, I am still left with a set ZZZ of 823 suffixes that occur with sh and/or ch initial; specifically, with 288 distinct sh-words (632 sh-tokens) and 597 distinct ch-words (1462 ch-tokens).  For these 885 words together, the q-word percentages are 

shZZZ  62/632 9.8%   |   chZZZ   193/1462 13.2%

That is, of the 623 sh-words with ZZZ suffixes, 9.8% are followed by a q-word; whereas, of the 1462 ch-words with these suffixes, 13.2% are followed by a q-word.  Said another way, the claim sh-words are more likely than ch-words to be followed by q-words is true for those 171 sh- and ch-words with YYY suffixes, but false for the remaining 885 sh- and ch-words with ZZZ suffixes.

Which indicates that the attraction of a sh- or ch-word to q-words is not an effect of those initial characters alone, but is determined by the whole word. 

By the way, the set YYY of suffixes above was determined it by a rather ad-hoc "greedy' method which may not be optimal.  That is, YYY may not be the smallest set whose exclusion reverses the overall sh/ch preference for q-words. 

There are still some "anomalies" that need further study, such that the fact that sh-words with suffixes ey,eey,edy,eedy,eeky,eeey,eody have frequencies very similar to those of the corresponding ch-words.

For these statistics I used my own transcription which is ~85% complete, filling the rest with Rene's transcription.  I considered only paragraph text (excluding labels, titles, circular text, and isolated letters) and excluded from the counts any word pair where one of the words had an 'unreadable' Eva character '?' or any kind of "weirdo" glyphs.  I also excluded ~5% of the tokens because they did not fit my "OKOKO + CMC" word structure model. So you may want to check the results above using your own transcription and counting criteria.

All the best, --stolfi