Does anyone know the rough proportions of Latin words that fall into each of the five declensions? Which is most common? Which is least common?
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2The percentages of the two answers come from different sources, one from a corpus and one from a dictionary. A corpus is more descriptive of actual use, but the question didn't specify what was meant.– Joonas Ilmavirta ♦Apr 21, 2020 at 17:25
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2 Answers
According to this study, the distribution is as follows:
- 1st declension 21.6%
- 2nd declension 23.7%
- 3rd declension 52.6%
- 4th declension 1.4%
- 5th declension 0.7%
("Development of Gender Classifications: Modeling the Historical Change from Latin to French," by Maria Polinsky and Ezra Van Everbroeck Language Vol. 79, No. 2, Jun., 2003, Table 2, pg. 362)
answered Apr 20, 2020 at 18:07
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1I wonder if the other stats are based on frequency of occurrence. 5th declension is tiny in terms of lexis, but dies and res are pretty commonly used words. Apr 22, 2020 at 14:30
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@CMonsour. According to the article, the data comes from two sources: another study, which is "The frequency of Latin words and their endings," Diederich, 1939; and a random sampling of 1500 nouns from classical Latin texts. Apr 22, 2020 at 14:42
Difficult to verify this research but, according to this Reddit thread, the distribution over An Elementary Latin Dictionary (Lewis) would be:
- 1st declension 19.14% (1248)
- 2nd declension 31.28% (2039)
- 3rd declension 45.93% (2994)
- 4th declension 3.59% (234)
- 5th declension 0.06% (4)
