An assessment of orthographic similarity measures for several African languages
Table 2: Other orthographic peculiarities: percentage of tokens that have a vowel as final character, incidence of consecutive vowels, and the number of r’s in the document.
['[BOLD] Language', '[BOLD] % FV', '∣ [BOLD] 2 vowel∣', '∣r∣']
Three other typical features we know that generally hold for isiZulu orthography As visually it looks like there are ‘clusters’ of languages regarding the final vowel , we subject the data to statistical tests (χ2). First, H0 and Ha are as follows, for the two categorical variables under consideration: Vowel-ending distribution for set of languages does not differ significantly. Vowel-ending distribution for a set of languages do differ significantly. It has a χ2=40, so with the degrees of freedom (df) of 16, we obtain p <0.001, i.e., they are statistically significantly different. Visually, especially Shona looks like an outlier and Runyankore somewhat similar, but these remaining four still results in significance with an α of 0.05 (χ2=23.41, df = 12, p = 0.024). IsiZulu, isiXhosa, and isiNdebele do not differ significantly (χ2=4.6, df = 8, p = 0.7993). (χ2=16.9, df = 8, p = 0.0308), whereas Sepedi, Sesotho, and Setswana are not statistically significantly different from each other (χ2=2.49, df = 8, p = 0.9622).