word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 34875 | m- |
2 | 25972 | s- |
3 | 23670 | k- |
4 | 22521 | b- |
5 | 22335 | p- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 22037 | me- |
2 | 13234 | di- |
3 | 11282 | pe- |
4 | 10703 | be- |
5 | 10622 | ke- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 13129 | men- |
2 | 8281 | ber- |
3 | 4894 | ter- |
4 | 4568 | mem- |
5 | 4316 | pen- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 5735 | meng- |
2 | 1853 | peng- |
3 | 1735 | meny- |
4 | 1535 | memb- |
5 | 1015 | berk- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 1076 | menga- |
2 | 972 | menge- |
3 | 827 | mengg- |
4 | 790 | menye- |
5 | 709 | mengh- |
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