Jake Lawrence · Corpus Linguistics / Language Learning / Open Data · Field Data theme
An open effort to close the digital-tooling gap for the Ukrainian language, built as content-as-code datasets a serious learner can actually use. Thread one is the foundation: a lemma-based, coverage-graded frequency list for modern Ukrainian, the top 12,000 lemmas ranked over 1.5 billion word tokens, with the empirical proof of how slowly reading coverage accrues in a heavily inflected language. Published as versioned, hashed CSV and JSON plus an Anki deck, CC-BY.
The language-tooling arm of the research program. A report on learning Ukrainian named the gap plainly: the frequency lists a serious adult learner needs are thin, often wordform-based, and sometimes quietly calqued from Russian, and the instruments that would let you measure progress (a vocabulary-size test, an elicited-imitation task) mostly do not exist as open, cited data. This series builds them and gives them away. Thread one is a lemma-based frequency list for modern Ukrainian, derived as aggregate counts from the UberText 2.0 lemma frequency dictionary (lang-uk) and published as a versioned, hashed CSV and JSON open-data release whose coverage curve re-derives live in the browser and in CI. The measured finding: the top 1,000 lemmas cover about 61 percent of running word tokens and 5,000 cover 82 percent, lower than the cross-Slavic extrapolation usually quoted, a direct measurement of the inflection tax. The CEFR-alignment, derussification, audio-and-paradigm, and vocabulary-test threads are registered planned, each naming the open source it will build on.
Two Ukraine field-data studies from opposite ends of the state's legibility. The Legibility Gap measures what the wartime state cannot read about its own damaged homes; Ukrainian Frequency measures what a learner has to read to reach the language itself, and builds the open list that makes the reading tractable.
Two field-data series in the same content-as-code, hashed-open-data mold, each shipping a versioned release whose numbers re-derive live. Pingree Grove publishes one village's rules as open data; Ukrainian Frequency publishes the core of a language as open data, both built to be forked.
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