Recently I was asked about some word & letter frequency apps which I had developed a few years ago. As these were not quickly accessible I did a little “googling” and found an interesting tool over at Stefan Trust Media. The app “WordCreator” does basic word and letter frequency counts as well as a couple of other interesting things which grass-roots literacy workers or primer developers may need when designing curriculum for unwritten languages.
His tool apparently allows for both word and letter frequency counts, but I was only successful at generating letter frequencies for Devanagari (Hindi) script, as shown above. The settings reveal a variety of interesting parameters which a linguist may like to tinker with including the use of regular expressions. A very interesting feature for primer developers is the ability to generate lists of 2, 3, 4 letter combinations which can be used for gleaning site word lists. For more detail, have a look at the page on Hindi syllable frequency.
One might ask, what is the use of an app to “create words”? That is perhaps the topic of another article. Let me simply say that modern assessments of early literacy skills often make use of the timed reading of artificial words as this gives teachers and researchers an insight into the phonologic (“bottom-up”) aspects of word recognition.
I’m wondering if others have discovered how to perform the word frequency counts using this app?