Hello everyone,
I’m Oliphant. I teach Ancient Greek and Latin in the greater Washington DC area. (MA, Greek Philology, Latin Philology, Philosophy, University of Munich, a long, long time ago). Despite all my years of teaching, I still find myself asking as many questions as I do giving answers.
So here’s my first question:
Does anybody know a reliable source for a percentage breakdown of Latin nouns by gender and declension, i.e., 2nd declension, 85% masculine, 15% neuter?
Thanks for any leads.
Oliphant
Wouldn’t it be difficult to produce meaningful information on this topic? My guess is that these statistics would vary by author, depending on the subject matter, and by period. And, particularly with regard to the breakdown between 2d declension masculines and neuters, the large number of past participles used as masculine or as neuter nouns could skew the results one way or the other.
Well, yes, it could be difficult if one were to extend the search all through the Middle Ages. But I was just thinking of the classical period, say 100 B.C. to 100 A.D. or however you want to define it. And restricting it just to plain old nouns, nothing like verbal nouns, etc. And just rough estimates, say, second declension masculine: 85%; neuter, 15%.
Salve Oliphant,
there is Paul Bernard Diederich’s paper “The frequency of Latin words and their endings” (1939). The paper’s purpose: “to discover what words and what inflectional endings occur most frequently in Latin literature.” It is “based on 202,158 words in selections from over two hundred Latin authors, from Ennius to Erasmus.”
A transcribed version of it was online at “http://users.erols.com/whitaker/freq.htm” for a while, but the web-site is offline now. However, I did download the entire paper while the site was still up and running. Also I created a semicolon-limited plain text file of the word frequency list part of the paper. You can download it from my web-site. Choose Word frequency according to Paul B. Diederich’s “The frequency of Latin words and their endings” to download the list.
By the way, does anyone know Mr. Whitaker? I believe that putting a copy of the transcribed paper online (ideally at Archive.org) would be helpful. I do have the files, but am not sure about copyright issues.
Vale,
Carolus Raeticus