Alberti's letter counts

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.