Lord Of The Strings Part 2

Computing the expected number of hits is the statistical equivalent of a control experiment in the physical sciences - in other words, what would be the outcome if there were no interesting behavior to study? You might think such an exercise to be of little use, as we're pretty sure there is something interesting going on. The point is that we can now compare the actual results that we obtained to the expected results, and look at the differences. The following table orders the languages according to the size of the difference between actual and expected number of hits.

Now we're getting somewhere. The languages with differences that are greater than zero may have had an influence on Tolkien. Furthermore, the size of the difference is also an indication of the level of influence. So we're beginning to see that Tolkien's mother tongue of English seems to have had the most profound influence on him. My reaction to this was, at first, one of surprise, then of reassurance. I was surprised because of the apparent dissimilarity of Tolkien's invented words to English, and the fact that the Tolkien words matched only three English words exactly. But I was reassured because Tolkien was, after all, English, and you would expect him to be heavily influenced by his native language.

Note also the particularly strong result for Hungarian, which received nearly three times as many hits as expected. Finnish performed almost exactly as expected, indicating no appreciable influence on Tolkien, whilst French and German performed well under expectations, perhaps indicating that Tolkien was deliberately avoiding the influences of these languages.

Conclusions

When I started this investigation, I had no idea what the result would be. I just clung firmly onto the belief that my string similarity metric, together with a simple algorithm to iterate over the set of possible word pair comparisons, would provide an interesting result. In fact, the results are very satisfying. I found that English had a profound effect on Tolkien's invented languages, with perhaps further influences from Hungarian and Spanish. This is satisfying because it is entirely reasonable (at least the part about English!), though not exactly what I expected after reading about the (apparently unfounded) claims for the influences of Finnish. It is also satisfying because it increases my confidence in the string similarity method. And as developers, we like to have confidence in our methods.