Re: Word length as a function of word frequency

Jeffrey Henning sikyal:

> I thought I had read a web page addressing word length as a function of
> word frequency before, but after a half-hour of searching Google I gave
> up and did a quick analysis of this English corpus in Excel:
> http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/bncfreq/lists/2_3_writtenspoken.txt
>
> Length of word - Average frequency of words with this length
>  1 - 1835.5
>  2 - 1790.7
>  3 - 900.2
>  4 - 211.3
>  5 - 110.7
>  6 - 78.6
>  7 - 71.9
>  8 - 63.1
>  9 - 59.5
> 10 - 53.6
> 11 - 49.9
> 12 - 47.1
> 13 - 48.7
> 14 - 36.4
> 15 - 33.0
> 16 - 30.0
Fun!

> I haven't scrubbed the corpus (and it looks like it could use it), but
> this quick and dirty analysis was all I needed for my conlanging
> activities of the moment, and proved my hypothesis correct.  The more
> frequent words in my conlang should be shorter than less frequent words,
> but frequency declines more gradually than I anticipated for words of 7
> or more letters.
My immediate thought is that spelling is a poor predictor of phonetic
length in English. E.g. 'straight': 8 letters, one syllable, vs. 'area', 4
letters, 3 syllables.

And I see you've addressed this in the next paragraph:

> I had toyed with converting the words to phonetic representations but
> decided it wasn't worth my time.  Obviously, the number of phonemes in a
> word is a stronger function of word frequency than the length of the
> English spelling of the word, but I didn't feel like using SOUNDEX or
> Zompist.com's English spelling algorithm (56 rules! --
> http://www.zompist.com/spell.html) to come up with approximations of the
> phonetic length.
>
> Anyone inspired to do a more statistically thorough analysis?
Not at the moment ;). But do post your results if you ever get around to
this.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

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