word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 128659 | ו- |
2 | 91808 | ה- |
3 | 77646 | ש- |
4 | 74250 | מ- |
5 | 72942 | ב- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 23843 | וה- |
2 | 15507 | ומ- |
3 | 15107 | כש- |
4 | 14760 | שה- |
5 | 14412 | המ- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 4319 | כשה- |
2 | 3692 | והמ- |
3 | 2385 | ולה- |
4 | 2076 | והת- |
5 | 1998 | המו- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 539 | כשהמ- |
2 | 484 | והמו- |
3 | 484 | ולהת- |
4 | 471 | ישרא- |
5 | 444 | כשהת- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 435 | ישראל- |
2 | 376 | אי-פי- |
3 | 234 | רויטר- |
4 | 232 | אנטי-- |
5 | 196 | בלתי-- |
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