[Corpora-List] Which Statistical Test is Suitable

[Yorick Wilks]

Im not sure if this contributes anything to the discussion or not, but there is clearly an obvious distinction between
,on the one hand, acceptable variants in spelling, where the balance shifts over time, e.g. judgement/judgment (especially as that one is not a US/UK distinction, a quite separate issue), and, on the other, misspellings among which there is huge variation, even for seemingly similar "errors".
For example if you compare on Google ceiling/cieling with piece/peice (where, importantly, the wrong versions are non-words in both cases) and where both seem to be "e/i reversal" you find that one error is a hundred times commoner than the other. Im not sure what that tells us about anything---such as mastery of explicit rules and their exceptions or not, as the case may be.
Yorick Wilks


On 16 Jul 2011, at 15:51, Angus Grieve-Smith wrote:

> On 7/14/2011 3:36 AM, True Friend wrote:
>> As you can see the frequencies are closely related, my aim was to summarize the group behaviour. The point here is to show the general public's usage, that despite of rules available, people are confused in spelling of these words.
> 
>    It's rarely just a case of "people are confused."  Croft (2000) talks about cases where a single community uses two different variants.  He is referring primarily to morphological or syntactic variation, but I think this also applies to spelling variation.  There are three possible outcomes:
> 
> 1. The alternative forms are reassigned to different functions so that they are no longer in competition.
> 2. The variation is reinterpreted as corresponding to a division of the community.
> 3. The community gradually shifts towards the use of one variant or the other.
> 
>    It's still not clear to me what statement you're trying to make, who you're trying to convince, and what your ultimate political goal is.  Whose usage do they really care about?
> 
> Croft, William. 2000. Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach. London: Longman.
> 
> -- 
> 				-Angus B. Grieve-Smith
> 				grvsmth at panix.com
> 
> 
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