word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 3371 | a- |
2 | 2636 | c- |
3 | 2198 | p- |
4 | 2118 | s- |
5 | 1521 | d- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 1064 | re- |
2 | 1048 | an- |
3 | 1010 | cu- |
4 | 709 | pr- |
5 | 637 | de- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 579 | cun- |
2 | 304 | ant- |
3 | 300 | pro- |
4 | 272 | cum- |
5 | 266 | per- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 181 | cump- |
2 | 179 | cunt- |
3 | 162 | ante- |
4 | 158 | cuns- |
5 | 103 | qu'a- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 87 | anter- |
2 | 85 | cuntr- |
3 | 57 | cunsi- |
4 | 55 | cumpr- |
5 | 54 | cunse- |
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