There was a physicist (a Nobel prize winner) on TV many years ago who
said he spent all of his time after he retired studying the statistics
of Shakespeare¹s writing.

I think I¹m a very determined deterministic Eddington monkey sometimes.
Take a 26 by 26 keyboard; the height of each key is proportional to the
letter pair frequencies in the first ten thousand characters of Hamlet.
I hit the highest key which stays down and it prints the letter t. Next
I hit the highest key in the h row because the first key was the letter
pair th, and it prints an h. Then I print an e, etc.. It will take
another kind of monkey to interpret what I type.

Here is the function g to simulate the mon-key.

g[n_, rowStart_, y_] := Module[{t, k, an, ne}, an = {rowStart}; t = y; k
= rowStart; Do[ne = First[Flatten[Position[t[[k]], Max[t[[k]]]]]]; t[[k,
ne]] = -1; k = ne; an = Append[an, ne], {n}]; an]

The 26 by 26 table c of the letter pair frequencies from the first ten
thousand characters of Hamlet in the statement below is from the book
Mr. Babbage¹s Secret, The Tale of a Cypher ‹ and APL, by Ole Immanuel
Franksen, 1985.

alphabet = CharacterRange[³a², ³z²]

alphabet[[g[48,First[Flatten[Position[c,Max[c]]]],c]]]

{t,h,e,r,e,s,t,i,n,d,i,s,e,a,n,t,o,n,g,e,n,o,r,i,t ,e,d,a,t,a,r,t,t,s,a,l,
e,t,r,a,s,o,u,r,o,f,t,u,t}

I got a hit on an Internet search for the meaning of the word ³trasour²
and it is probably a tracery, something you might find in king tut¹s
tomb (which was broken into twice ³in antiquity²) and sold at an art
sale.

The 28 by 28 letter pair correlation matrix s from the book Scientific
and engineering problem-solving with the computer, by William Ralph
Bennett, Jr., 1976 based on the dialog from Act III of Hamlet with an
alphabet that includes the space and the apostrophe: it is obvious the
first letter must be a q because that row has a sum of one more than the
sum of the corresponding column.

alphabetTwo = Join[CharacterRange[³a², ³z²], {³ ³, ³¹²}]

alphabetTwo[[g[26,17,s]]]

{q,u,r, ,t,h,e, ,a,n, ,m,e,r,e,n,d, ,w,h,a,t, ,s, ,i,n}

They spell the Moslem religious book ³the Qur¹an², sometimes.

Does anybody know what this kind of characteristic run through a
frequency table is called? Can anybody give a probability based estimate
of what to expect from it from various text?

Cliff Nelson