[Tlhingan-hol] Fwd: RE: Klingon Scrabble

Rohan Fenwick - QeS 'utlh qeslagh at hotmail.com
Sun Jan 6 04:49:39 PST 2013


I've been out of the loop for a while so haven't been able to say anything much in the thread, but:

jatlh Qov:
> 

It's not very many words you have there, so probably only 'ay''a' wa'. It
would be interesting to compare to Hamlet or any other
manuscript.

luq, qaH. :) For Qov's (and others') interest, I've just done a letter-frequency using maHvatlh's tool on what I've done so far for mIl'oD veDDIr SuvwI'. This comprises 80 'ay'mey, and around 20,700 words up to the moment. Since I've rendered all names into Klingon phonotactics, some of the frequencies will be skewed slightly by names, but here are the results, in decreasing order of frequency:

Total phonemes surveyed: 122,250



'           13473

a          13059

I           7731

e          7704

H         7182

o          7097

u          6421

j           6216

v          4958

m         4363

D         3949

l           3759

gh        3702

t           3528

q          3481

ch        3342

b          3199

S          3014

p          2820

n          2656

w         2411

y          2021

tlh        1807

r          1791

Q         1677

ng        889
/m/ is slightly overrepresented and /b/ and /D/ slightly underrepresented 
because of a couple of short exchanges in Krotmag dialect, but there are
 large enough gaps between /m/, /b/ and /D/ and their neighbours that standardising the Krotmag exchanges won't alter the relative distributions. I haven't included /N/-counts for this reason.

The comparison to the list from nuq bop bom is intriguing. For starters, in my text qaghwI' is the most frequent of ALL letters! This agrees well with Qov's assertion that the Scrabble distribution needs more qaghwI'mey. The letter with the biggest discrepancy between our lists is /t/, which is 19th in Qov's list but 14th in mine. I'm quite sure this is because three of the main characters have names with /t/ in them: 'avtanDIl, taryel, and tIna'tIn. Removing these makes /t/ drop in frequency to 16th (below /ch/). The two other big discrepancies are /gh/ and /v/, both of which are more common in my list: /v/ and /gh/ are 9th and 13th in mine, compared to 12th and 17th in Qov's. I'd put this down to narrative style, as a great deal of mIl'oD veDDIr SuvwI' is people talking to and about themselves: there's likely a lot of vI- and -'egh causing this. The frequency of /j/ also agrees with that, as does the fact that /I/ (in both /jI-/ and /vI-/) outranks both /e/ and /o/, where it doesn't for nuq bop bom.

All my other letters, though, differ by two places or less from Qov's list. /ng/ is last for me too, by a very considerable margin. The fact that /ch/ is actually *less* frequent for me is odd, though, because I happen to know that my natural form for "but" (one of the most frequent words in written text) is /'ach/ while Qov more usually seems to uses /'a/.

QeS
 		 	   		  
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