Alberti's letter counts

TL;DR

This paper revisits Alberti's early observations on Latin vowel usage in poetry and oration, statistically analyzing a large corpus to confirm stylistic differences and study sample size requirements.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative validation of Alberti's 15th-century observations using modern statistical methods on a large Latin text corpus.

Findings

Poets used more a's, e's, and y's

Orators used more other vowels

Sample sizes are sufficient for statistical significance

Abstract

Four centuries before modern statistical linguistics was born, Leon Battista Alberti (1404--1472) compared the frequency of vowels in Latin poems and orations, making the first quantified observation of a stylistic difference ever. Using a corpus of 20 Latin texts (over 5 million letters), Alberti's observations are statistically assessed. Letter counts prove that poets used significantly more a's, e's, and y's, whereas orators used more of the other vowels. The sample sizes needed to justify the assertions are studied, and proved to be within reach for Alberti's scholarship.