The analysis of word length is interesting. English has a lot of long, multi-syllabic Latin based words, and also a lot of short Germanic based words. I wonder the extent to which a higher percentage of long words indicates a preference for the Latin and vice versa.
In the 19th century, Lucy Aikin, under the pen name Mary Godolphin, wrote Robinson Crusoe In Words Of One Syllable and a number of other classics for children using only monosyllabic words. Apparently there are over 9000 monosyllabic English words, but writing this way is surprising hard. It's an interesting exercise, but reading the books feels like reading a telegram.
I wonder how well a machine automated one-syllable rendering would fair (compared to the manual ones). You'd need to use a thesaurus limited to single syllables and ensure the correct meaning was being chosen. Doesn't sound too hard.
Interesting idea! Just filter WordNet's synonym sets of 155,287 words with a list of one-syllable words. (I read there are 9,000+ words, but I can't find a list online at the moment.)
