Statistics on syllables in Italian

I generated some statistics about the frequency of syllables in Italian language in order to use them in cognitive psychology.

Here's an example of the calculations my scripts and programmes have done.

I started from a list of words with their frequency in Italian.

Starting from this example file (the actual one was extremely longer):

• 130 abachi
• 11328 abaco
• 1090 abate
• 11656 abati
• 7117 abat-jour
• 17595 abbacchi
• 6415 abbacchiare
• 22948 abbacchiarsi
• 31126 abbacchiato
• 14558 abbacchio
• 3571 abbachi
• 22879 abbacina
• 18492 abbacinai
• 1200 te

I hyphenated the words (separated the syllables with ~) and got a result file like

• 130 a~ba~chi
• 11328 a~ba~co
• 1090 a~ba~te
• 11656 a~ba~ti
• 7117 a~bat-jour
• 17595 ab~bac~chi
• 6415 ab~bac~chia~re
• 22948 ab~bac~chiar~si
• 31126 ab~bac~chia~to
• 14558 ab~bac~chio
• 3571 ab~ba~chi
• 22879 ab~ba~ci~na
• 18492 ab~ba~ci~nai
• 1200 te

Then the scripts generated some statistical tables on syllable frequency. Below you'll find some examples.

Here's the legend of the table headers:

Syllable

a syllable in italian language

% tot

the syllable frequency in percentage

total frequency

the total syllable frequency

whole word

the total frequency of the syllable in the case in which it forms a whole word

1, 2, 3, 4

the total frequency of the syllable in the case where it appears in that position in a word

last

the total frequency of the syllable in the case where it's the last of a word

Here the syllables are group by “skeleton”: c stands for consonant, v for vowel and S for foreign letter (for instance “w” and “y”)

Here the syllables are group by number of letters

Here the syllables are group by “type”. In Italian there are “open” and “closed” syllables. Open syllables end with a vowel, while closed ones end with a consonant.