Which Latin declension is most common?

Question

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?

The percentages of the two answers come from different sources, one from a corpus and one from a dictionary. A corpus is more descriptive of actual use, but the question didn't specify what was meant. — Joonas Ilmavirta, Apr 21 '20 at 17:25

Expedito Bipes · Accepted Answer · 2020-04-21T13:35:59.887

15

According to this study, the distribution is as follows:

("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)

edited Apr 21 '20 at 13:35

answered Apr 20 '20 at 18:07

Expedito Bipes

2

I 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 '20 at 14:30
1

@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 '20 at 14:42

MattAllegro · Answer 2 · 2020-04-22T09:58:06.973

5

Difficult to verify this research but, according to this Reddit thread, the distribution over An Elementary Latin Dictionary (Lewis) would be:

edited Apr 22 '20 at 09:58

answered Apr 21 '20 at 20:45

MattAllegro

2 Answers2