Project Vyx Zwo

Welcome to Vyx Zwo. Everything on the outside is the same as the first project (Vyx Eins), but the code has been completely redone. All of the computing work is done on my home computer, and the results are posted here. I think the other main difference is that I will count accented characters as seperate characters until I verify they are merely different forms. Keeps me from having to recount a language if I found out ç really isn't c.

Links of interest:

• Wikipedia
• ISO 639 Language Codes
• http://www.rotary.org/
• Bible Sites
• http://www.biblegateway.com/
• http://www.ibs.org/

According to these standards:

• 3,013 characters per page (220,000 characters take up 73 pages)
• 500 pages per inch

Vyx Zwo has read 23,023 pages of material (3.84 feet!).

Welcome to Project Vyx. I thought it would be interesting to see how often each letter of English occurs in everyday use. I then thought it would be interesting to see how often each letter of German is used, which soon extended to other Germanic languages. Now I've decided to count every language I can get my hands on.

To give you a rough estimate of how much processing is going on behind the scenes, image this: 220,000 characters take up 73 pages in Word, Which is 3,013 characters a page. This translates to 5,000,000 characters taking up 1,690 pages. Your average package of paper has 500 pages, so you'd need a stack of about 4 inches of paper to print out everything this script reads. Per language.

The results posted here probably aren't "fair". That is, the text I count is probably biased in some way. For example, a lot of my text comes from versions of the Bible translated into various languages - that means the letters J, E, S, and U may be inaccurately represented.


A Note on Help

Having people who know a language is really helpful when I'm trying to count it. Take Arabic, for example - I know nothing about the Arabic script and need to find somebody who does before I can even decide if it's countable by Vyx. For this reason I must stick with languages that use a Latin-based alphabet for the time being.

The Data

• Indo-European
• Uralic
• Altaic
• Austronesian

These are all the languages I've counted in the order I counted them:

1. English
2. German
3. Swedish
4. Norwegian
5. French
6. Italian
7. Hungarian
8. Spanish
9. Portuguese
10. Danish *
11. Turkish *
12. Platt (Niederdeutsch) *
13. Cebuano *

*: these languages aren't finished for one reason or another. I count a language finished once I have sent 5 million characters through the program.

Project Vyx results by Randi Hagen 2004-05 @ http://www.kriona.net/dml/vyx/