Journal of Current Scientific Research

Journal of Current Scientific Research

Current Issue Volume No: 2 Issue No: 1

Research-article Article Open Access
  • Available online freely Peer Reviewed

  • Stylometric Analysis Of Lafond's Letter That Never Wrote Simón Bolívar To San Martín

    Isea Raúl 1
       

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

    Abstract

    The goal is to analyze that Lafond s letter by stylometric methods, supposedly written by Simon Bolivar to General San Martin about the destiny of Ecuador. The Delta function was calculated after evaluating 16 letters from Simon Bolivar and including another 11 letters from San Martin. The reason for including San Martin s letter was to verify if the method used could distinguish between the two authors. A linguistic corpus was constructed using functional words, and a dendrogram was used to visualize the result. Finally, it is concluded that the letter to Lafond is false. Simon Bolivar never wrote this letter.

    Author Contributions
    Received Aug 19, 2023     Accepted Sep 19, 2023     Published Oct 04, 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) Stylometric Analysis Of Lafond's Letter That Never Wrote Simón Bolívar To San Martín Journal of Current Scientific Research. - 2(1):24-30
    DOI 10.14302/issn.2766-8681.jcsr-23-4727

    Introduction

    Introduction

    Recently, several documents have appeared that have been collected at different times, and many of them have been auctioned or donated to various institutions. For example, the letter signed by Simón Bolívar for the victory at the Battle of Cúcuta in 1813 was auctioned by Doyle in 2016 for $23,750 1. Another example is the 1521 letter by Hernán Cortés that was sold for $32,500 in 2017, and two years later, it was discovered that the letter was stolen from the Historical Archives of the Nation of Mexico 2.

    Other documents are also emerging that have subsequently been proven to be false, for economic reasons or even for public recognition. A famous example is Galileo's 1610 manuscript that was exhibited at the University of Michigan Library and later proved to be a forgery of Tobia Nicotra 3.

    Therefore, it is necessary to develop computational methodologies that enable us to verify the authenticity of documents and to be able to rule out any counterfeiting with the help of information technologies. Thanks to this, it is possible to carry out linguistic studies using the tools generated by a discipline called stylometry, primarily dedicated to recognizing patterns in the written language 456.

    Stylometry is a discipline that began to be established by the Polish writer Wincenty Lutoslawski (1863–1954) to determine the chronology of the Plato Dialogues 7, as well as the author's discovery of an unknown comedy that was in the National Library of Spain and was recently attributed to Lope de Vega instead of Miguel Bermúdez, as indicated in the work file 8. Another example is the work of who have not been included as authors of the work 9.

    Another example was the analysis of the Book of Mormon (wrote by Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon), where it is indicated that the author was not Joseph Smith 10, but later work suggested that it was none of them 11. In light of the foregoing, the present paper examines the letter Lafond allegedly written by Libertador Simón Bolívar to General José de San Martín, in which the fate of the Republic of Ecuador was being conferred 12.

    Results

    Results

    Figure 1 displays the results of the frequency of the words derived from Simón Bolívar’s letters (shown as columns in this figure), while the results derived from Lafond's letter are shown as a black line. This graph demonstrates that there is no proportion of functional words, among which are highlighted "la," "a," "no," "los," "me," "lo," "este," "le," and "esta," indicating that the Lafond letter does not reproduce the style of the Liberator's Bolívar.

    It shows the distances determined by the word frequencies of Simón Bolívar’s letters (all of which begin with the letter B for easy identification), as well as the distance determined by the “evil letter” of Lafond (the result is shown as a black line).

    Figure 2 shows the result represented as a dendrogram (Figure 2). This figure shows that the letters are forming clusters grouped by the same author; that is, it is presented how only the letters of Simón Bolívar or of General San Martín are grouped among themselves, noting that both authors have their own style when writing.

    Moreover, the Lafond letter is not included in any cluster formed by other letters from any of the liberators of Hispano-American; that is, the letter does not reproduce the linguistic footprint of the Libertador Bolívar, much less the style of San Martín. Thirdly, the style of writing of San Martín has little variation, unlike the richness of style present in the letters of Bolívar, because they are grouped into different branches.

    It shows the rectangular dendrogram that was produced by stylometric analysis of the letters written by Simón Bolívar, San Martin, and Lafond. San Martín's letter begin with SM, while Bolívar's letter begin with the B.

    Conclusion

    Conclusion

    The goal of this paper is to find out the validity of Lafond's letter through stylometric analysis and to determine whether Simón Bolívar was really disposing of the future of the Republic of Ecuador with General San Martín. After analyzing the Delta function, it was found that Simón Bolívar never wrote the aforementioned letter to General San Martín. Therefore, it is confirmed that Lafond's letter is false and only sought to damage the reputation of Libertador Bolívar.

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