A Data-based Classification of Slavic Languages: Indices of Qualitative Variation Applied to Grapheme Frequencies

Abstract

The Ord graph is a simple graphical method for displaying frequency distributions of data or theoretical distributions in the two-dimensional plane. Its coordinates are proportions of the first three moments, either empirical or theoretical. A modification of the Ord graph based on proportions of indices of qualitative variation is presented. Such a modification makes the graph applicable also to categorical data. In addition, the indices are normalized with values between 0 and 1, which enables comparison of data files divided into different numbers of categories. Both the original and the new graph are used to display grapheme frequencies in eleven Slavic languages. As the original Ord graph requires an assignment of numbers to the categories, graphemes are ordered by decreasing frequency. Data are taken from parallel corpora; in the present instance these are grapheme frequencies from a Russian novel and its translations into ten other Slavic languages. Cluster analysis is then applied to the graph coordinates. While the original graph yields results which are not linguistically interpretable, its modification reveals meaningful relations among the languages.