word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 4210 | स- |
2 | 4068 | प- |
3 | 2768 | व- |
4 | 2624 | क- |
5 | 2505 | अ- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 1858 | प्- |
2 | 1242 | वि- |
3 | 987 | स्- |
4 | 652 | नि- |
5 | 604 | सम- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 1834 | प्र- |
2 | 506 | स्व- |
3 | 305 | निर- |
4 | 286 | श्र- |
5 | 223 | अन्- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 391 | प्रा- |
2 | 278 | प्रत- |
3 | 217 | निर्- |
4 | 196 | सर्व- |
5 | 154 | श्री- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 165 | प्रति- |
2 | 99 | भारती- |
3 | 99 | विद्य- |
4 | 98 | पूर्व- |
5 | 88 | विश्व- |
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