Similarities between vocabularies

Abstract

When reading a text such as, for example, the gospel of Matthew, we feel that the language in it is more similar to the other gospels or the Old Testament than it is to, say, the language of the Sherlock Holmes stories. One of the reasons for this must be the similarity between the vocabularies of the different chapters of the Bible. I would like here to propose a method to measure this kind of similarity and to show that the method can also be applied in other fields of linguistics.

Notes

Address correspondence to: T. Miyajima, Kyoto Tachibana Women's University, 34 Vamada‐Cho, Oyake, Yamashi‐na‐Ku, 607 Kyoto, Japan.