89 karma · joined September 27, 2021
The other function is as a dummy subject, as in "it rained", "it's cold". English grammar requires a subject (unlike many other languages, where a pronoun in subject position can be ommitted without the sentence becoming ungrammatical). So here "it" doesn't refer to anything, it's (haha) just there to fulfill a syntactic requirement
t. linguist
A better approach would be to use a markov chain built from sampling English text letter-by letter... an even better approach would be to build your stats from some source of English words in IPA transcription with syllable boundaries etc marked, then map from IPA to spelling via some kind of lookup table. We use a similar process in reverse in my research group for building datasets for doing Bayesian phylogenies of language families