Frequency Counts in South Asian Poetry; Sultan Bahu's Concept of Mystical Love

AbstractWord frequency methods have been used by psychologists, linguists (and of these computational linguists), etc. with a variety of purposes. In this study the frequency count method has been applied in order to find out a thematic hierarchy within a group of related texts. The particular texts chosen are a group of 70poems of the XIII century South- Asiatic author Sultan Bahu. Sultan Bahu's poems contain his interpretation of the Beloved and human's relationship with Him. The importance of this research lies in the fact that Sultan Bahu's texts have never been thoroughly analyzed from a linguistic point of view. Through the analysis of the results of the frequency counts a hierarchy of subtopics within the main topic will be revealed. The present research paper attempts to uncover and evaluate Sultan Bahu's concept of mystical love and its components in a hierarchical manner.Key Words Quantitative method, applied linguistics, computational linguistics, frequency counts, Sufipoetry, Sultan Bahu, mysticism, mystical love.IntroductionThe evolution of linguistics has without any doubt developed into more quantitative methods being used in this discipline. On the other hand, the presence of metaphors in poetry is abundant and many times, the basis of poetry itself. "Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish -a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language", Lak off& Johnson (1991, 3). For this reason, in poetry, grasping the meaning the poet is trying to convey can on many occasions become a matter of extreme complexity.The reader of a poem can perceive the overall idea of the poem at hand simply by reading it. The interpretation of the poem is an entirely different matter. The average man may read poetry for enjoyment. A Spanish reader will have no knowledge of the fact that, for example, the word agora in Spanish language constitutes a phonetic residue of the Latin ablative hac horaand the form agora without preposition, the fossilized form. In the mind of the common reader agora means ahora (now) in old Spanish.Different linguistic methods exist to reveal the age of a poem. Taking the case of the eleven syllable verse in Spanish language, it is well known among literary experts and linguists that it was imported from Italy in the XVI century and the main authors are Garcilaso de la Vega and Boscan. If further we take the example of Egloga I, this one can be traced to any time between 1534 and 1536.The analyzed data indicates that it probably belongs to 1534, due to the elements present in the poem and facts of Garcilaso's life, not of pertinence for this study. In any case, according to Rafael Lapesa, the criteria of naturalness and selection did prevail during almost the complete sixteen century in Spain (1942, 302). Similarly, other methods exist depending on the objective the linguist or the literary expert needs to achieve. The linguist will analyze every word, every punctuation sign, every capitalized term. In a sea of different topics, which continuously are being mentioned, it may seem to the average reader that all points referred to by the author would have the same level of importance, since unconsciously the brain is focused on the meaning of the poem and in the form, on its beauty.According to Keith Johnson from Berkley "However, if you were to observe that the form was used 15 times in this manuscript but only twice in a slightly older manuscript, then these frequency counts begin to take the shape of quantified linguistic observations that can be analyzed with the same quantitative methods used in science and engineering"(2008, 4). In this manner two systems can be related, the poetic system as well as the linguistic system. The poem will be broken down into significant parts to be analyzed as if it was lab work. This is an example of what Zwicky calls overlay systems. "With this term I will to refer to poetic forms, language games, secret languages, systems of expressive word formation, codes and ciphers, writing systems, and some conventional schemata for borrowing words from one language into another" (1986 ,57). …