Made out of people

Four dimensions of english words

Via Language Log, a nifty visualization of 4-letter english words here (Written with Processing, which is incredibly pretty looking).

Each letter is a different dimension. X,Y,Z are each the second, third, and fourth letters of the word.

It's interesting, although it's got a few difficulties. I agree with Language Log that it really should do some sort of dimensionality reduction, and perhaps a shuffling of the elements: there's a lot of noise in the system from coincidences. (Specifically, the visualization implies that there is meaning to adjacency, that A is "closer" to B than it is to E. Is that true, linguistically?

Don't we have ways of measuring these things? Perhaps transforming it into another space--a pronunciation space, for instance--would be informative. Sort it by phonemes.