Old Norse Lemma Frequency: Towards a Learner's Frequency Dictionary of Old Norse

Paul Nation (1990 & 2006) has shown the importance of lemma frequency (lists) in learning and acquiring language in an effectively systematic way, and how the first 5000 lemmata cover around 98% of (most) texts, which is around the percentage of known words a reader requires to comprehend a text fully. In the present paper I have started the work on such a lemma frequency list for Old Norse, by synthesising two corpora, Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson and Sigrún Helgadóttir (2011) “Saga Corpus” (1 651 398 tokens) and a corpus consisting of the Menota main, runic, & charter corpus (558 204 words), which utilise opposite methods for lemmatisation and normalisation, and statistically comparing their vocabulary similarities. A corpus based learner's lemma frequency dictionary is an invaluable tool for any learner of any language, and would prove useful for both learners and teachers alike, and an Old Norse lemma frequency list would be key to both developing Old Norse graded readers and categorising Old Norse primary text into difficulty levels based on vocabulary, so that introductory courses wanting to make use of primary text can make a scientifically and statistically informed decision on which texts to prioritise. A list of the 1000 most frequent (lemma) collocations was also created, which could prove useful to anyone interested in frequent word-pairs. The initial ca. 2 000 000 token corpus proved fruitful for the first 1000, but the accuracy went down from the second 1000 onwards, hence it was concluded that a much larger corpus is needed.