word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 8529 | ا- |
2 | 6366 | ک- |
3 | 6186 | م- |
4 | 5342 | ب- |
5 | 4841 | س- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 1211 | ای- |
2 | 1178 | ال- |
3 | 1108 | پر- |
4 | 1076 | کو- |
5 | 997 | ان- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 487 | اور- |
2 | 273 | کار- |
3 | 212 | مار- |
4 | 212 | پرو- |
5 | 183 | پرا- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 145 | عبدا- |
2 | 101 | تاری- |
3 | 88 | وزیر- |
4 | 80 | پہنچ- |
5 | 79 | اٹھا- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 141 | عبدال- |
2 | 93 | تاریخ- |
3 | 62 | کہا:’- |
4 | 48 | بتایا- |
5 | 45 | پہنچا- |
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