Letter/symbol frequency?

Letter/symbol frequency?

One of the other writing hobbies I have is lipograms–text that excludes a common letter of the alphabet. In English, the most commonly used letter is E, which makes it the hardest to exclude, and most often used in these kinds of challenges. There’s information about other languages here; often, vowels are the most common letter.

I have a few short sample texts in my language, so I ran them through this frequency analyzer to see which were the most common letters. It turns out that D is most common in mine. (I think because I have different symbols for macroned and non-macroned vowels, they get split up so no sound is particularly common.) O and K, depending on context, are next; V is least. (This is also a good way to see if any disallowed letters have slipped in accidentally!)

So if I was going to write a lipogram in my conlang I would probably try to omit D, which means probably present tense, first and third person, no plurals or regular adverbs. 😉

Anything stand out from yours? Is there anything comparable for non-alphabetic writing systems?

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4 thoughts on “Letter/symbol frequency?

  1. Oooh! What fun! I don’t have any extant samples but I’m super curious how my langs will shape up if I throw them in there. Hm…

    Bookmarking.

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  2. The only one that would really give me problems and be challenging for that sort of thing so far is /w/ because verbs have that, in all tense and all persons except the one verb form that is for non-human subjects.

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