word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 4142 | s- |
2 | 3601 | c- |
3 | 3526 | a- |
4 | 3041 | d- |
5 | 2978 | p- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 1916 | co- |
2 | 1468 | in- |
3 | 1426 | ri- |
4 | 1320 | de- |
5 | 1121 | l'- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 903 | con- |
2 | 830 | del- |
3 | 552 | all- |
4 | 488 | pro- |
5 | 485 | pre- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 765 | dell- |
2 | 413 | all'- |
3 | 266 | dall- |
4 | 252 | cont- |
5 | 243 | inte- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 755 | dell'- |
2 | 259 | dall'- |
3 | 217 | nell'- |
4 | 161 | inter- |
5 | 145 | sull'- |
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