I’m not exactly sure what the dialoge should be…
Both of those charts make sense to me…are we supposed to find something unusual about them?? Greek has tons of conjunctions and articles and particles…I’m not suprised to see them listed.
Hi John,
Interesting charts. You should add a key. Does this represent the percentage of total words used in each work? Or is it based on a smaller selection?
I was interested to see that the Theogony differed most from the Homeric poems in the use of the conjunctions καί and τε. I wonder if this reflects a possible difference of subject matter (eg. lists and geneologies), or of style (eg. asyndeton).
What conclusions do you draw about Homeric authorship based on comparison of an oral epic tradition with modern American novelists? Perhaps you could explain why you wanted to make the comparison, and whether or not you were surprised by the data.
~N
Sorry about the lack of information – yes all charts represent total word count and each words percentage of the whole withtin the named text.
Interesting thought you have about the kai and te–and perhaps not de, being PP. ---- asyndeton in Iliad and Odyssey – Demodokos song in the Odyssey is perhaps averaged out by the size of the overall text.
I wanted to chart the most common words and overlay texts as a sort of “fingerprint of authorship”.
other thoughts I have are to look at the text in uppercase without accents to see the percentage each glyph is used within the text or even book to book and then again overlay this data.
another is to use parsing data and chart the most frequent syntactic patterns within each text or book.
I was just thinking (without conclusions) this may start an interesting dialog, dialogue, dialoge διάλογος
or perhaps an expert in textual forensics may see this and go to work on it in earnest.
note: I used the modern authors only to test the method.
note to Kopio: sorry for the lack of information, these charts are not to show the most common words but to show the frequency those words are used within a particular text or book etc.
John
If you are looking for observations; It may be interesting that there seems to be a lot more variation in the Greek chart than there is in the English one.
The most freguent word in one Enlish text matches the other text fairly closely.
The same cannot be said for the Greek texts.
If you were to pick Moby Dlck’s word frequency to establish the order of the words along the graph it seems that in general the graph would be going from high to low for three of the four books.
The same cannot be done with the Greek writings.
I am not sure if this is surprising to anyone but I found it remarkable.