Journal of Language Research

Journal of Language Research

Current Issue Volume No: 1 Issue No: 1

Research-article Article Open Access
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  • A Stylometric Analysis Of Two Sentimental Letters By Albert Einstein And Simón Bolívar

    Isea Raul 1
       

    1 Fundacion IDEA Hoyo de la Puerta, Baruta, Venezuela. 

    Abstract

    On social networks often circulate emotional letters from various authors that appear after their death. The supposed letter Albert Einstein wrote to his daughter Lieserl and the letter Simon Bolivar wrote to his cousin Fanny are two examples. A Python-developed tool is used to do a stylometric study to determine whether these authors were. The language styles of Einstein and Bolivar were described using eight and six letters, respectively. The results show that they never wrote these letters.
    Author Contributions
    Received Sep 04, 2023     Accepted Oct 30, 2023     Published Nov 29, 2023

    Copyright© 2023 Isea Raul.
    License
    Creative Commons License   This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

    Competing interests

    The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

    Funding Interests:

    Citation:

    Isea Raul (2023) A Stylometric Analysis Of Two Sentimental Letters By Albert Einstein And Simón Bolívar Journal of Language Research. - 1(1):15-20
    DOI 10.14302/issn.2998-4122.jlr-23-4739

    Introduction

    Introduction

    Letters written by great people in history are circulating on social networks. An example is the letter that the German physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) wrote to his daughter Lieserl Einstein. In this letter, he shows that love is the only answer to the survival of our species. There is also a letter that Simon Bolívar (1783-1830) claims to have written to his cousin Fanny du Villars, written on her deathbed, telling her how important she was in his life.

    In fact, Albert Einstein's letter to his daughter analyzes the concept of love as a universal force that science has not yet fully developed. This letter says that love is seen as light, gravity and life. It is the only energy in the universe that humans have not learned to control at will. Suggests that love is the most powerful force because it has no limits.

    Simón Bolívar wrote a letter to his cousin Fanny du Villars, obtained from the archives of the National Academy of Medicine of Colombia (https://www.interacademies.org), to express his emotional affection for her. In the letter, he describes the surrounding nature and emphasizes the beauty of the Caribbean Sea, the magnificent mountains and the colorful sky, and tells her how important she was in his life. The strange thing is that the real name of the French woman was Louise Jeanne Nicole Arnalde "Fanny" Denis de Keredern de Trobriand (1775-1859).

    On the other hand, all the papers of Albert Einstein are collected in various databases such as The Collect Papers of Albert Einstein (https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/), Einstein Papers Project (https://www.einstein.caltech.edu/), and so on. None of them have any proof of the existence of this letter to his daughter.

    The same applies to the documents of Simón Bolívar available at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (https://www.cervantesvirtual.com). There is also no information in these files about the existence of this emotional letter. For all this, these letters are analyzed according to the stylometric methodology as described below.

    Results

    Results

    Figure 1 shows the result of normalization of the frequency of words obtained from the English letters of Albert Einstein when the n-gram is equal to two (ie two words). It can be seen that the alleged letter to daughter does not follow the same pattern as her other letters, with the words with the biggest difference such as “of the”, “it is”, “in a”, “is the”, “and the”, “to me”, among others.

    Normalization of the frequency of appearance of words obtained from Albert Einstein's letters, using the Manhattan distance, and MRW equal to 35.

    Figure 2 shows the result of the normalization of the frequencies of words obtained from the letters of Simón Bolívar using n-gram equal to 1 and MRW = 50. This graph shows differences between the letters, such as “mi”, “los”, “para”, ”he”, “si”, “dinero”, among others.

    Normalization of the frequency of appearance of words obtained in the letters of Simón Bolívar using Manhattan’s distance.

    Figure 3 shows a rectangular dendogram of Albert Einstein's letters. It was observed that the supposed letter to the daughter does not reproduce the linguistic styles of the other eight letters, that is, the supposed letter (labeled Daughter) does not belong to any of the three groups (clusters) that make up the rest of letters.

    Rectangular dendrogram obtained from a stylometric analysis of Albert Einstein's letters, visualized with iTOL (Letunic, 2021).

    Figure 4 shows a rectangular dendogram of Simón Bolívar's letters, showing that his cousin Fanny's letter does not belong to any of the two large conglomerates that repeat the style of Bolivar. Therefore, Fanny's letter was not written by Simón Bolívar.

    Rectangular dendrogram obtained from the stylometric analysis of the Bolívar letters, visualized with iTOL (Letunic, 2021).

    Conclusion

    Conclusion

    The paper's goal was to determine whether Albert Einstein and Simon Bolivar actually penned amorous letters to their daughter and cousins, respectively, by looking for linguistic evidence in their letters. It is established that they did not write these tearful letters based on the findings of a stylometric examination.

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