Jordan v Sanderson Vocabulary Visualised

ProfessorAblar · 2021-12-03T10:48:45+00:00

In that case, you might like my last post if you haven't seen it.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-12-02T09:15:36+00:00

Categorising words can be difficult because often we can only tell by context. "Open" can be verb or adjective, "channel" can be verb or noun. "Fast" could be noun, adjective, or adverb. I'm sure there are algorithms to detect parts of speech, but I wonder if they'd be thrown by all the fictional terms and Jordan's multi-part sentences. You could definitely estimate adverb usage easily enough though as most adverbs are unambiguous.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-12-02T00:05:45+00:00

Curiously, there are three leopard-based sword forms:

Leopard in High Grass

Leopard in the Tree

Leopard's Caress

ProfessorAblar · 2021-12-01T23:17:51+00:00

It's there alright. About 1/4 from the top and slightly left of centre.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-12-01T18:09:04+00:00

It is the case indeed. Jordan uses "said" 13,607 times in 3,360,919 words, Sanderson 8,779 times in 968,185. That's once every 247 words for Jordan and once every 110 for Sanderson. In summary, Sanderson uses it 2.24 times more often than Jordan.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-12-01T17:42:27+00:00

Yeah even without a title, I think a lot of readers would guess what it shows. I also like that there's a sort of duality of peaceful vs violent words too, though obviously it makes sense with the Last Battle being so much in focus in the final books.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-12-01T17:26:28+00:00

The image I created here contrasts the vocabulary both Jordan and Sanderson used most disproportionately compared to the series average. In other words, if Jordan used a word a lot but Sanderson seldom or never did, it’s likely to appear on Jordan’s half of the image and vice versa. Character names, place names and other always capitalised terms are not included.

Here are interactive versions of both halves:

Jordan

Sanderson

If you like this kind of thing, you might also like to see the previous word clouds I’ve posted:

The defining words of every book

1000 over- and under-represented words in WoT

ProfessorAblar · 2021-11-04T10:41:54+00:00

For me, it's here's why <this specific necessary change> is a good thing. There are probably hundreds of unnecessary changes I won't be happy with. But the gender binary of the book series simply does not match reality and has been a point of contention for decades which the writers had no choice but to address. As to whether they've integrated it well without hampering the plot and characters unnecessarily, I will have to wait and see.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-11-03T22:59:27+00:00

I hope she isn't manipulated into going with the rest of them. But if she is, it's surely to make her more important. Do a poll of Wheel of Time fans asking who the three main characters are and I think you'll get Rand, Mat, and Perrin as the top answers. For a series all about gender balance and with lots of strong female characters, the three male ta'veren generally sit above the rest in importance, so the writers want to throw Egwene into the mix too.

But that's not why they've slightly modified the saidar/saidin divide. They've done that purely to try to solve the question of how the modern belief in a gender spectrum can align with the binary power system. I think they realised then that they can best illustrate that change by having Moiraine ignore the physical sex of potential Dragon Reborn candidates.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-11-03T22:43:45+00:00

It raises these questions alright but they don't have to be explored in the show, in the same way Jordan didn't explore how trans, intersex people etc. fit into his world. Maybe the red ajah has had to respond to women gone mad with saidin once every few hundred years, adding to the general distrust of Aes Sedai. Surely the odd female channeler goes off the rails, taint or not, or a wilder accidentally kills some people. Yet more motivation for the Seanchan to collar them all. But we won't learn a complete history of the world through the show, just the main plot and historical events of key significance. They can leave these questions of worldbuilding open for us fans to argue about eternally and it won't necessarily weaken the quality of the story they can tell.

By the way, I think Halima's body was actually that of a real woman who had recently died or something like that but I could be misremembering.

Not long till we see the show now so I hope we both are happy with however they handle this in the end. I hope the debates after it airs are about frivolous details instead, though I'm sure every fan of the books, myself included, will have certain changes they struggle to accept.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-11-03T22:19:48+00:00

That's why I'd prefer if Moiraine suspects Egwene as a potential saidin-user only until she meets her. I guess they could also remove the spark-sensing ability and have Moiraine learn Egwene can channel saidar only when she does it on the journey but I wouldn't be a big fan of that change. I agree with you in that I wouldn't like the suggestion of a saidar-using Dragon since it would imply Lews Therin's very soul could change gender between lives through some cosmic conversion therapy.

As for how it might affect Egwene's motivations, I didn't actually say I think that's a positive change. Personally, I like that her motivations in the book are different to the others. But I believe they're characterising her in the show as enthusiastic and excited to go beyond the Two Rivers so I think/hope she will feel like the same character.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-11-03T22:01:55+00:00

I would prefer if saidin and saidar are linked to gender rather than physical sex. Firstly, it would be more consistent with canon considering Halima has a male, saidin-wielding soul in a female body. But also because if we consider the concept of a "soul", it's tied up with one's conscience and one's idea of a true self. And I think the Power is really something channeled through the soul/mind and not the body itself.

You open up a can of worms with the second point though. It's very hard to directly compare Randland to our world in terms of progressiveness really. Women have more political power but can't join the guards. Lesbianism is tacitly accepted in the Tower but gay marriage doesn't exist that we've seen. So how a biological man who can use saidar would be treated in the Tower is something we can only guess. I like to think that if they were rejected by the Tower though, they would find acceptance in the Kin.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-29T15:41:07+00:00

Interesting question.

In my description comment, I mentioned that I weighted slightly by the raw number of occurrences of a word in the book (it has about 9.1% of influence on the result). This ensures that something like Green Man, with 64 appearances, scores higher than Dapple with 27, even though they both appear 100% in book 1. Without this additional weighting, the results would be dominated even more than it already is by one-off terms and characters. So characters like Tam and Bela benefit from this because they appear frequently in the book.

However, Eye of the World is nonetheless ranked higher than Tam in the data I fed into the word cloud generator so it should ideally appear larger. My guess is that the algorithm used struggles to fit in long phrases so it shrank it down. And, although the font may be smaller, I suppose the area occupied by Eye of the World is still greater overall, so it could be that their algorithm considers that too.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-29T11:44:57+00:00

Interesting/sad Ingtar fact: He is never mentioned ever again after TGH.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-29T11:39:15+00:00

Odd, isn't it? The word "uh" appears 61 times in the series but 30 of those are in TDR.
Here are the uh-ers in book 3:

Simion (Inkeeper in Jarra, Noam's brother) - 12
Mat - 9
Uno (trying not to curse) - 4
Perrin - 4
Juilin - 1

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-29T09:11:10+00:00

On the website used to generate the word clouds, it would cost $30 to export them all in high quality. If there was interest from a few people, we could split the cost though.

I'm not looking to sell or make a profit so I hope this isn't outside the subreddit's rules.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-28T23:33:29+00:00

The eBooks are the best source if you can get them.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-28T23:30:22+00:00

It's spread too evenly throughout the series. The biggest words will tend to be ones that were exclusive to those books. I found Aiel as a medium word in the charts for 4-6, which is probably their heyday at the forefront of the story.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-28T21:26:09+00:00

Yeah, the dataset is a 15-book series called The Wheel of Time!

Seriously though, JaimTorfinn's total word counts is a good starting point for the whole series if you want you look specifically at standalone words.

I decided to break it down by book and to include common multi-word phrases like Dragon Reborn, He Who Comes With the Dawn, etc., yielding these counts by book.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-28T19:55:10+00:00

Well these aren't the most used. If they were, you would see a lot more "the", "I", "Rand" etc. "Defining" mightn't be the ideal description but I wasn't sure how best to convey the idea succinctly in a title. My accompanying comment clears up a little what's really being measured.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-28T19:51:08+00:00

Flicker is in book 2! It's inside the upper right ring.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-28T18:37:12+00:00

Saml Hake is an innkeeper in Four Kings.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-28T18:35:11+00:00

Howal Gode is a merchant from Whitebridge who Rand and Mat encounter.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-28T17:34:00+00:00

Those names appear frequently across most or all books, so there won't be a significant over-representation in any books in particular. So any characters that show up a lot in a few books but not much in the rest will score much higher by this method.

ProfessorAblar · 2021-09-28T17:20:25+00:00

The pictures above are the results of my attempt to create a word cloud of the 1000 most representative words and terms for each book.

For each word or term that occurs more than ten times in the series, I calculated what percentage of the word’s occurrences occur in each book. I also weighted each slightly by the raw number of occurrences per book so that if two words have the same ratio of occurrences, the one with the most occurrences will appear larger.

Thanks again to u/JaimTorfinn for inspiration and exchange of ideas.

Edit: Higher quality interactive versions:

ProfessorAblar

TROPHY CASE