[Corpora-List] Which Statistical Test is Suitable

[Geoffrey Sampson]

Dear Muhammad Shakir Aziz,

I don't see that anyone else has responded to your query, so let me do so,
rather late.  I would say that no kind of statistical test could possibly
indicate whether variant spellings were errors, or allowable alternatives;
because this question is not to do with numbers.  It is a question about
where authority over the norms of the language you are concerned with is
felt to lie, and what that authority says about orthography.  Some
languages, at some periods, tolerate a wide variety of alternative
spellings for given words, while other languages (or the same languages at
other periods) may have extremely tightly-defined norms and strong social
sanctions against violating them.  Carrying out statistical calculations on
tables of the incidence of alternatives would not tell you anything about
this, I believe.

Geoffrey Sampson


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