Alberti’s letter counts. Ycart, B. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 29(2):255--265, June, 2014. 00003
Alberti’s letter counts [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
Four centuries before modern statistical linguistics was born, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) compared the frequency of vowels in Latin poems and orations. Using a corpus of twenty Latin texts, Alberti’s observations are statistically assessed. Letter counts prove that poets used significantly more a’s, e’s, and y’s, whereas orators used more of the other vowels. The sample sizes needed to justify the assertions are studied, and proved to be within the reach of Alberti’s scholarship. Alberti appears to have made the first quantified observation of a stylistic difference ever, anticipating by more than four centuries the developments of stylometry and statistics.
@article{ycart_albertis_2014,
	title = {Alberti’s letter counts},
	volume = {29},
	issn = {0268-1145, 1477-4615},
	url = {http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/2/255},
	doi = {10.1093/llc/fqt034},
	abstract = {Four centuries before modern statistical linguistics was born, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) compared the frequency of vowels in Latin poems and orations. Using a corpus of twenty Latin texts, Alberti’s observations are statistically assessed. Letter counts prove that poets used significantly more a’s, e’s, and y’s, whereas orators used more of the other vowels. The sample sizes needed to justify the assertions are studied, and proved to be within the reach of Alberti’s scholarship. Alberti appears to have made the first quantified observation of a stylistic difference ever, anticipating by more than four centuries the developments of stylometry and statistics.},
	language = {en},
	number = {2},
	urldate = {2015-05-04TZ},
	journal = {Literary and Linguistic Computing},
	author = {Ycart, Bernard},
	month = jun,
	year = {2014},
	note = {00003},
	keywords = {computational linguistics, cryptanalysis, cryptography, cryptography -- arabic, history of ideas},
	pages = {255--265}
}

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