A mind for language

Vocabulary statistics of reading through John’s Gospel

2022-08-26

More interesting John stats

I was wondering what would happen to our vocabulary as we read through John’s Gospel.

The following table shows the percentage of unknown lemmas one can expect to encounter in a given chapter after reading all preceding chapters. So after reading chapters 1-5, we can expect that 28.7% of the lemmas in chapter 6 will be unknown.

Chapter	%
1	100
2	56.9
3	37.4
4	43.5
5	27.5
6	28.7
7	21.0
8	11.5
9	17.7
10	19.8
11	24.7
12	16.1
13	17.1
14	6.9
15	8.4
16	8.8
17	2.0
18	24.5
19	27.1
20	11.6
21	15.0

John displays drop in unknown items after chapter 4 to around 20-25% per chapter. Keep in mind these numbers include names and hapaxlegomena.

To me this shows that reading through John as a way to teach students Koine Greek is a decent strategy. They will need much more support in the early chapters, but should begin to feel some success in chapters 8-9 and again in 14-17.

Of course this is based on lemmata. What about forms?

The following table shows the number of unknown forms encountered in a given chapter after reading app the preceding chapters. Again it tapers off as did the numbers for the lemmata, but the percentage of unknown items is 20-35% and drops below 40% after chapter 6 rather than chapter 4.

Chapter	%
2	68.9
3	53.0
4	58.4
5	47.9
6	42.3
7	35.9
8	29.2
9	31.7
10	35.4
11	38.2
12	32.8
13	30.3
14	22.3
15	25.2
16	20.4
17	24.7
18	32.2
19	36.7
20	24.5
21	28.0