  Four centuries before modern statistical linguistics was born, Leon Battista
Alberti (1404--1472) compared the frequency of vowels in Latin poems and
orations, making the first quantified observation of a stylistic difference
ever. Using a corpus of 20 Latin texts (over 5 million letters), Alberti's
observations are statistically assessed. Letter counts prove that poets used
significantly more a's, e's, and y's, whereas orators used more of the other
vowels. The sample sizes needed to justify the assertions are studied, and
proved to be within reach for Alberti's scholarship.
