[Sacajaweau]

Actual author of the Night Before Christmas??? Really??

[x]

That's something that's been argued about.

Livingston and Clark Clement Moore were related by marriage, so it's possible that Livingston wrote the poem and it eventually got to Moore and was published.

A computer analysis said that Livingston was the more likely author.

[mairdie]

MacDonald Jackson and I, my husband and a friend who was president of computational linguistics while I was chair of programming languages, spent two solid years and then some doing statistical analysis of unconscious patterns in poetry. One method we used was to transcribe the entire bodies of work of Livingston and Moore into phonemes, the sounds of words. Then we statistically compared the phoneme patterns of those bodies with the phonemes of the Christmas poem. Every test said Henry.

Mac is an emeritus professor in New Zealand, most known for his work on Shakespeare.