Where to find old article on frequency of letters, pairs of letters, triplets and quadruplets in 4 or 5 languages?

Question

It was probably in the 1980s (not sure) and probably in Scientific American (not sure) that I read an article reporting on research that had analyzed the frequency of letters, pairs of letters and triplets and quadruplets of letters in four or five languages. Two of the languages were English and Italian. I don't remember the other two or three.

The authors -- or rather, their computer -- then "wrote" a paragraphs in each language using the frequency rules for that language, first for letters only, then for letters plus pairs of letters, then adding triplets and finally adding quadruplets.

It was fascinating the way the paragraphs progressed from pure nonsense resembling nothing, to nonsense closely resembling each language. To a non-Italian speaker, the last Italian paragraph -- the one including the quadruplet rules -- looked like Italian. The English looked as though it ought to make sense....maybe with a few glasses of wine it would.

Does anyone recognize this article or this research?

Has this research been followed up? Are there applications of this research, or linguistic insights resulting from it?

Answer 1

I don't recognize the article, but you're describing generative orthotactics (possibly as implemented in a Finite State Machine). (See also 'phonotactics', which does the same thing on sequences of phonemes/phones.) You may also have noted various 'Markov' Twitter accounts, which perform this generation using sequences of words, again instead of letters. The concepts of this approach are still used for different applications in fields like automatic speech recognition, phoneme-grapheme conversion, psycholinguistics (see 'wordlikeness'), morphology/language innovation, etc.