In this post I discuss, in brief and embryonic form, the difference between lemma and token frequencies for John’s Gospel. At the bottom of this post you’ll find an unwieldy table. I haven’t quite figured out a good way to do tables.

Anyway, these days I’m doing lots of thinking about language teaching, reading and text based approaches, etc. etc.. And I thought it would be useful for my super-baby-coding skills to pull up a list of words in John’s Gospel sorted by frequency, both the lemmata, and the actual instances. That’s what’s on the table at the bottom (only covering the 100 most frequent lemmata, and then the 100 most frequent tokens sorted accordingly). The left-most two columns are frequency and lemma, and all the columns to the right of that are tokens.

About 5 words down things get interesting. It’s much more useful to learn εἶπεν and εἶπον than filling out the Pres.Act.Ind. paradigm of λέγω. Similarly, the two highest frequency forms of εἰμί are ἐστίν and ἦν. σύ is the most interesting, because it’s two highest tokens are actually the plural, which looks nothing like σύ. ἔρχομαι is also interesting, because I actually thought its aorists forms would turn up with higher frequency, but it’s ἔρχεται that is the star performer in John.

There’s much more to be done, but since I was messing around with this, I thought it would make a good little post between Christmas and New Year.