By a strange coincidence the two other investigations published in 1888 both introduced the same new material independently, as it seems, of one another. The surprising thing is that it took the scholars of Germany seven years to hit upon this rich linguistic field of reply formulae, even though Dittenberger had previously touched its brink with his observations on τί μήν; The works were those of H. Siebeck and C. Ritter, the latter's being by far the larger and more accurate.

Siebeck's was not an independent article but an appendix (pp. 253ff.) to the second edition of his book. Moreover its results were not intended to stand by themselves, merely to support where possible those obtained by the comparison of the dialogues’ contents, which were presented earlier in the book in the chapter on Plato. Just as the value he placed on his language statistics was of a secondary nature, so too apparently was the care with which he produced them.

The rules which he laid down for the application of these statistics to the determination of the chronological order of the dialogues were practical and precise. The subject of his inquiry was twofold; (a) simple, direct questions, i.e. those that can be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’, (b) answers conveying assent. His method was to take the total number of instances of each particular expression in a dialogue, then calculate the percentage of its occurrence in relation to the aggregate of all the instances in that particular category, either (a) or (b). On the differences between these percentages in the various dialogues were based the conclusions regarding chronology.