Newbie: Large dictionaries (OT)

[Mikkel Rasmussen]

An example of non-use of combinations:
In Danish there are about 10.000 single syllable words (not word forms) out
of about 50.000 valid combinations. A single syllable word can be anything
from one letter to seven letters.

Question 1: How many percent of the possible combinations are are used?
Question 2: How many percent of the possible combinations are pronounciable?


Mikkel Rasmussen
www.mellon.dk


Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> wrote in message
news:3A969403.59F2114 at alcyone.com...
> Mikael Olofsson wrote:
>
> > Well, there are approximately 300 million combinations of 6 letters
> > from an alphabet of size 26. I wouldn't be surprized if there actually
> > are 4 million unique words of length 6 in some language.
>
> That tells you very little, because only a tiny proportion of those
> three hundred million letter combinations represent reasonable
> combinations of sounds that are legal in a given language, much less
> actual words in that language.
>
> --
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