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?
-
Just to confront the data in the accepted answer with those in this Reddit thread. – MattAllegro Apr 21 at 7:38
-
2@MattAllegro Those percentages seem to come from a dictionary instead of a corpus. A corpus is more descriptive of actual use, but the question didn't specify what was meant. – Joonas Ilmavirta♦ Apr 21 at 17:25
-
@JoonasIlmavirta definitely true, it would just be interesting to have more sets to compare – MattAllegro Apr 21 at 17:31
-
@MattAllegro It would! I'd be happy to see more answers. It's interesting to see how different choices change the numbers. Do you want to write up an answer? – Joonas Ilmavirta♦ Apr 21 at 18:02
-
@JoonasIlmavirta I just did :) – MattAllegro Apr 21 at 20:45
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 at 18:07
-
2Could you also add 2003 (year) and perhaps the stable link? jstor.org/stable/4489422 – Alex B. Apr 21 at 12:22
-
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. – C Monsour Apr 22 at 14:30
-
@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. – Expedito Bipes Apr 22 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)
