I'm sure one could use a corpus (either online or paper) to come up with a word frequency statistic, but has anyone ever done a letter frequency study? i played a game called "Bananagrams" (similar to Scrabble but with some differences) this afternoon at my Spanish conversation group and thought it would be a good activity as Esperanto gatherings. However, e.g. "u" is used (or could be) much more in the Esperanto version of the game, I should think, than in either English or Spanish. And of course, there would be no need for Q, W, X, or Y and additional tiles for the "hatted" letters would be needed. But I digress.

I'm sure that various letters are used more/less in Esperanto than in other languages, so.....

orthohawk:but has anyone ever done a letter frequency study?

Yep. That's exactly what I did a couple of weeks ago: Letter frequencies

Some other people have done letter frequency in the past to come up with a scoring system for Esperanto Scrabble. Last I checked (coming on ten years ago now) there were at least two different Esperanto Scrabble scoring systems hanging around, I guess based on different people's calculations.

The problem with using the frequency of occurrence of certain letters as a basis for the point allocation in an Esperanto Scrabble set is that certain letters that may have a low frequency in normal text may be very easy to use on the Scrabble board in the extension of word already placed by another player.

They therefore have a playability much higher than their naturally occurring frequency.