word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 5696 | s- |
2 | 3717 | f- |
3 | 2474 | b- |
4 | 2381 | h- |
5 | 2311 | l- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 1158 | sk- |
2 | 1114 | st- |
3 | 787 | sa- |
4 | 755 | vi- |
5 | 720 | fr- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 615 | sam- |
2 | 377 | upp- |
3 | 372 | hei- |
4 | 354 | for- |
5 | 311 | lan- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 275 | fram- |
2 | 267 | land- |
3 | 220 | arbe- |
4 | 211 | fólk- |
5 | 196 | fisk- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 220 | arbei- |
2 | 204 | lands- |
3 | 188 | fólka- |
4 | 165 | barna- |
5 | 155 | sjálv- |
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