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A statistical probe into the word frequency and length distributions prevalent in the translations of Bhagavad Gita

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Abstract

A statistical study has been conducted on Bhagavad Gita. Four measures have been derived for the original text in Sanskrit and its translations in Hindi, English and French. First, word frequency distributions for the documents were modelled. Power law was observed with the longest tail in the case of Sanskrit. For other versions, the distributions well replicated the Zipf–Mandelbrot pattern. Second, the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence between the documents has been computed with the highest value recorded in all three translations from the Sanskrit text. Next, a Shannon entropy-based measure: vocabulary quotient has been calculated, which estimates the vocabulary richness the texts offer; the highest being in the case of Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. Finally, word-length distributions were obtained with the longest word length in Sanskrit. The results attribute to the inflectional nature of Sanskrit.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Ramanujan College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, 110 019, India

    Nikhil Kumar Rajput & Bhavya Ahuja

  2. Department of Physics, Veer Chandra Singh Garhwali Uttarakhand University of Horticulture and Forestry, Tehri Garhwal,  246 123, India

    Manoj Kumar Riyal

Authors
  1. Nikhil Kumar Rajput
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  2. Bhavya Ahuja
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  3. Manoj Kumar Riyal
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Correspondence to Bhavya Ahuja.

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Rajput, N.K., Ahuja, B. & Riyal, M.K. A statistical probe into the word frequency and length distributions prevalent in the translations of Bhagavad Gita. Pramana - J Phys 92, 60 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12043-018-1709-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12043-018-1709-8

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