word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 33865 | s- |
2 | 32968 | m- |
3 | 28253 | t- |
4 | 27810 | M- |
5 | 27282 | a- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 9772 | ya- |
2 | 9656 | qa- |
3 | 9485 | tə- |
4 | 8115 | mə- |
5 | 7364 | Ma- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 2926 | yar- |
2 | 2143 | qar- |
3 | 1911 | ist- |
4 | 1891 | pro- |
5 | 1836 | kon- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 1314 | yara- |
2 | 1144 | yarı- |
3 | 1033 | Qara- |
4 | 941 | isti- |
5 | 802 | keçi- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 748 | yarım- |
2 | 691 | qeyri- |
3 | 675 | dəyiş- |
4 | 631 | başla- |
5 | 591 | göstə- |
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