Related papers: Alberti's letter counts
A number of elite thinkers in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries pursued an agenda which historian Paolo Rossi calls the "quest for a universal language," a quest which was deeply interwoven with the emergence of the scientific…
Aristotle considered particular quantified sentences in his study of syllogisms and in his famous square of opposition. Of course, the logical formulas in Aristotle work were not modern formulas of mathematical logic, but ordinary sentences…
Interest in the mathematical structure of poetry dates back to at least the 19th century: after retiring from his mathematics position, J. J. Sylvester wrote a book on prosody called $\textit{The Laws of Verse}$. Today there is interest in…
In this paper we present a set of experiments carried out with BERT on a number of Italian sentences taken from poetry domain. The experiments are organized on the hypothesis of a very high level of difficulty in predictability at the three…
Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have prompted academic concerns about their impact on academic writing. Existing studies have primarily examined LLM usage in academic writing through quantitative approaches, such as word…
The words of a language are randomly replaced in time by new ones, but it has long been known that words corresponding to some items (meanings) are less frequently replaced than others. Usually, the rate of replacement for a given item is…
We develop a quantitative method to assess the style of American poems and to visualize a collection of poems in relation to one another. Qualitative poetry criticism helped guide our development of metrics that analyze various…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
We present Latin BERT, a contextual language model for the Latin language, trained on 642.7 million words from a variety of sources spanning the Classical era to the 21st century. In a series of case studies, we illustrate the affordances…
Italian is a Romance language that has its roots in Vulgar Latin. The birth of the modern Italian started in Tuscany around the 14th century, and it is mainly attributed to the works of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni…
In this paper we develop a method to analyze the increase of complexity from classical Greek poetry to classical Latin poetry by mapping large samples of those poetry onto a symbolic time series. This mapping setup intends characterize…
Tracing connections between historical texts is an important part of intertextual research, enabling scholars to reconstruct the virtual library of a writer and identify the sources influencing their creative process. These intertextual…
The similarity of the evolution of human languages (or alphabets, bird songs, >...) to biological evolution of species is utilized to study with up to $10^9$ people the rise and fall of languages either by macroscopic differential equations…
We analyze the dynamic properties of 10^7 words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800--2008 in order to gain insight into the coevolution of language and culture. We report language independent patterns useful as…
Given a random text over a finite alphabet, we study the frequencies at which fixed-length words occur as subsequences. As the data size grows, the joint distribution of word counts exhibits a rich asymptotic structure. We investigate all…
We propose a methodology to study music development by applying multivariate statistics on composers characteristics. Seven representative composers were considered in terms of eight main musical features. Grades were assigned to each…
Statistical linguistics has advanced considerably in recent decades as data has become available. This has allowed researchers to study how statistical properties of languages change over time. In this work, we use data from Twitter to…
This research extends a method previously applied to music and philosophy,representing the evolution of art as a time-series where relations like dialectics are measured quantitatively. For that, a corpus of paintings of 12 well-known…
This discussion paper reflects on how quantitative approaches to historical linguistics interact with dataset properties. Drawing on two worked examples, we examine English data using quad-based concept modelling of Early Modern English…
The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that…