word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 502 | t- |
2 | 424 | w- |
3 | 396 | T- |
4 | 376 | k- |
5 | 294 | M- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 345 | wh- |
2 | 187 | ta- |
3 | 147 | Ma- |
4 | 143 | Ta- |
5 | 140 | ka- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 290 | wha- |
2 | 89 | Ngā- |
3 | 72 | Wai- |
4 | 71 | Wha- |
5 | 57 | kai- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 256 | whak- |
2 | 67 | Ngāt- |
3 | 37 | Whak- |
4 | 31 | Rang- |
5 | 22 | Mata- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 255 | whaka- |
2 | 66 | Ngāti- |
3 | 37 | Whaka- |
4 | 27 | Rangi- |
5 | 17 | Kāti- |
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