Statistical analysis of Early Buddhist Texts

[Gillian]

This thread might interest you @animitto

Average Word Length as indicator of Pali text age

The Pali language, as every other language, has evolved over time. One of the changes that the language has undergone through the centuries is that words have become increasingly complex and words have merged together to form longer words. We would therefore expect that a statistical analysis of average word-length could be an indication of relative ”age” of the texts in question. In this research I analyse the average word-length of each text and each book in the Pali canon to find trends in t…