Diederich's 1939-page on Word Frequency

Salvete,

I was approached by a Textkit-member concerning a discrepancy between the number of entries in the list on my homepage and another list. My version is based on the original paper as transcribed and hosted on William Whitaker’s (the creator of the WORDS-programme who died in late 2010) original web-site (I downloaded the data at the time).

It is not quite that easy to say that one chooses all words with a certain frequency (e.g. “20 and up”) because the full frequency list distinguishes between Prose, Poetry, and Medieval Latin. There is also a “Total”-column, but such a mixed frequency can be misleading, in my opinion. I certainly would not want a list with poetry-specific words (nor proper names and words based on these as “Romanus”, “Gallus”). In addition, the paper had an appendix with more lists:

  • First three hundred Latin words in order of frequency.
  • Supplementary list of words important chiefly in medieval Latin (a short list).
  • Words in the present College Entrance Examination Board Latin Word List which occurred less than five times in the literature examined.

The original web-site “http://users.erols.com/whitaker/freq.htm”, whence I downloaded the original files (themselves transcriptions of the original paper), is no longer available, but it can be accessed using Archive.org’s Wayback Machine.

For continuity sake I have now uploaded these files in pdf-format (zip-file, 418 kb) to the Download-section of my homepage, mostly for continuity sake (in case of the “Wayback”-version evaporating). The version available using the Wayback Machine is better.

Valete,

Carolus Raeticus

Thanks for this! It’s great to finally be able to read Diederich’s original paper!

For comparison, another interesting frequency list is the Dictionnaire fréquentiel Index inverse de la langue latine by Delatte et al (1981 - L.A.S.L.A. - Université de Liège). Here a database of 794662 words (582411 prose, 212251 verse) is used, resulting in a vocabulary of 13077. That list, ordered by occurrence, starts at page 119.

Salvete,

today I stumbled upon a scan of the original paper of Diederich’s Frequency of Latin Words and Their Endings. The version on my homepage is merely a transcription made by someone a while ago. This one is the actual paper. I thought I would share it, should anyone be interested in it for historical reasons. It can can be found at this omnika.org-page.

Valete,

Carolus Raeticus