word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 66881 | α- |
2 | 55539 | π- |
3 | 53013 | ε- |
4 | 40887 | κ- |
5 | 38781 | σ- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 20170 | αν- |
2 | 18610 | κα- |
3 | 16408 | πρ- |
4 | 14888 | δι- |
5 | 14268 | συ- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 11443 | προ- |
2 | 8466 | δια- |
3 | 8406 | κατ- |
4 | 8335 | απο- |
5 | 8205 | παρ- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 5251 | κατα- |
2 | 4870 | παρα- |
3 | 4141 | προσ- |
4 | 3960 | αντι- |
5 | 3358 | περι- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 1170 | μικρο- |
2 | 1157 | επανα- |
3 | 933 | πρωτο- |
4 | 917 | κατασ- |
5 | 786 | http:- |
The tables show the most frequent letter-N-grams at the beginning of words for N=1…5. Their frequency is count without multiplicity, otherwise the stopwords would dominate the tables.
As shown in the above example (German), word prefixes are clearly visible. In the above example, ver- and ein- are prefixes, and Sch- is not. At the end of a prefix we typically have a wide variety of possible continuations. Hence a prefix of length k will be prominent in the table for N=k, but typically not in the table for N=k+1. The prominent entries Schw- and Schl- for N=4 tell us that Sch- is no prefix.
Zipf’s diagram is plotted with both axis in logarithmic scale, hence we expect nearly straight lines. The graphs look more typical for larger N. Especially for N=3 we find only a small number of trigrams resulting in a sharp decay.
For a language unknown to the reader, the data can easily be used to see whether prefixes do exist and to find the most prominent examples.
For counting, only words with a minimum character length of 10 were considered.
Because only a word list is needed, the tables above can be generated from a relatively small corpus.
For N=3:
SELECT @pos:=(@pos+1), xx.* from (SELECT @pos:=0) r, (select count(*) as cnt, concat(left(word,3),"-") FROM words WHERE w_id>100 group by left(word,3) order by cnt desc) xx limit 5;
For more insight in a language, longer lists might be useful.
Is there a need for larger N
Most frequent word endings
Most frequent letter-N-grams
Number of letter-N-Grams at word beginnings
Number of letter-N-Grams at word endings