The Italian reading room
Eight Italian tales, counted
The Italian room's ledger: one tale in Carlo Collodi's Italian, four fairy tales by Luigi Capuana, two tales from Edmondo De Amicis's «Cuore» and Luigi Pirandello's «La giara», counted exactly as they are served in the reading room. Nothing on this page is estimated or typed in by hand; every figure is computed from the room's own data files when the page is asked for, and the same table is a file.
The shelf, whole
15,682 running words across 1,571 sentences, containing 2,015 distinct lemmas — of which 45.7% occur exactly once across the whole shelf. 730 of those 2,015 lemmas (36%) appear in more than one tale. 26 of the lemmas are proper names, which the word lists leave out.
The four authors
Shared is how many of an author's lemmas appear in some other author's tale on this shelf; own is how many do not. Met once is the range, tale by tale, of the share of a tale's lemmas that appear in it exactly once.
| Author | Tales | Words | Sentences | Words a sentence | Distinct lemmas | Shared | Own | Met once | Passato remoto per 1,000 words |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carlo Collodi | 1 | 741 | 48 | 15.4 | 226 | 172 | 54 | 52% | 24.3 |
| Luigi Capuana | 4 | 8,013 | 966 | 8.3 | 1,113 | 541 | 572 | 42–48% | 22.3 |
| Edmondo De Amicis | 2 | 3,775 | 248 | 15.2 | 879 | 462 | 417 | 53–55% | 24.6 |
| Luigi Pirandello | 1 | 3,153 | 309 | 10.2 | 813 | 447 | 366 | 56% | 21.2 |
The passato remoto, counted
The last column counts only forms that can be nothing else: the auxiliaries' «fu», «furono» (with its clipped «furon»), «ebbe» and «ebbero», and the «-ò» of verbs in «-are» — a printed form ending in «ò» whose dictionary form is the same word with «are» in its place. They occur 357 times on the shelf: 38 of the first kind and 319 of the second, the commonest being «andò», «tornò», «gridò», «domandò». It is an undercount of the tense — «disse» is passato remoto too, and is not in it — and is printed as a floor, not a total.
The tales, one by one
Own lemmas to 95 is how many of a tale's own dictionary words, commonest first, cover 95% of its running text.
| Tale | In English | By | Words | Sentences | Lemmas | Appear once | Own lemmas to 95 | Words per sentence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cappuccetto Rosso free | Little Red Riding Hood | Collodi, 1875 | 741 | 48 | 226 | 52% | 189 | 15.4 |
| La piccola vedetta lombarda | The Little Lombard Lookout | De Amicis, 1886 | 1,353 | 125 | 430 | 53% | 363 | 10.8 |
| Le arance d’oro first scene free | The Golden Oranges | Capuana, 1882 | 1,794 | 227 | 398 | 45% | 309 | 7.9 |
| L’uovo nero | The Black Egg | Capuana, 1882 | 1,943 | 253 | 462 | 42% | 365 | 7.7 |
| Spera di sole | Sunbeam | Capuana, 1882 | 2,115 | 220 | 516 | 47% | 411 | 9.6 |
| Ranocchino | Little Frog | Capuana, 1882 | 2,161 | 266 | 522 | 48% | 414 | 8.1 |
| Il piccolo scrivano fiorentino | The Little Florentine Scribe | De Amicis, 1886 | 2,422 | 123 | 658 | 55% | 537 | 19.7 |
| La giara | The Oil Jar | Pirandello, 1909 | 3,153 | 309 | 813 | 56% | 656 | 10.2 |
The same rows, said in sentences
«Cappuccetto Rosso» carries 741 words in 48 sentences; 189 of its 226 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«La piccola vedetta lombarda» carries 1,353 words in 125 sentences; 363 of its 430 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«Le arance d’oro» carries 1,794 words in 227 sentences; 309 of its 398 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«L’uovo nero» carries 1,943 words in 253 sentences; 365 of its 462 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«Spera di sole» carries 2,115 words in 220 sentences; 411 of its 516 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«Ranocchino» carries 2,161 words in 266 sentences; 414 of its 522 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«Il piccolo scrivano fiorentino» carries 2,422 words in 123 sentences; 537 of its 658 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«La giara» carries 3,153 words in 309 sentences; 656 of its 813 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
What these printings spell differently
The printings are modern Italian. This is the whole of the difference a modern dictionary would notice — 22 printed forms, most of them a grave accent where the acute is set today or the «j» of an older spelling — and today's spelling stands beside each one.
| As printed | As spelled today |
|---|---|
| Ajuto | Aiuto |
| Perchè | Perché |
| Senonchè | Senonché |
| abbajando | abbaiando |
| aja | aia |
| ajutami | aiutami |
| ajuto | aiuto |
| benchè | benché |
| finchè | finché |
| fornaciajo | fornaciaio |
| fuorchè | fuorché |
| gajezza | gaiezza |
| massaje | massaie |
| nè | né |
| pajo | paio |
| perchè | perché |
| poichè | poiché |
| potè | poté |
| purchè | purché |
| rasojo | rasoio |
| sè | sé |
| trentatrè | trentatré |
The file
eight-italian-tales-counted.csv — one row per tale, the columns above, openable in any spreadsheet.
Method
Mined, never made. The tales are public-domain texts, entire and in the Italian they were printed in — no invented sentences, no simplified retellings; one of them, «Cappuccetto Rosso», is itself Collodi's Italian of a tale by Perrault, and is counted as the Italian text it is. Words are counted with the same tokenizer the room's gloss apparatus uses, which splits «l’albero» into two words at the apostrophe, and mapped to dictionary forms through the room's own form-to-lemma table, so these figures and the ones on each tale's own page are the same arithmetic.
The room records 13 places where it reads otherwise than the transcription it was taken from: quotation marks, apostrophes and ellipses set the way Italian printing sets them, the date line of a diary entry left out of a monthly tale, and accidents of transcription at page turns and line ends. An older spelling that is an Italian word is not one of them: it stands as printed, and is in the table above.
The other four rooms keep their own ledgers: Russian classics, counted, which carries the fuller coverage ladder, Grimm, counted, Quiroga, counted and Perrault and Daudet, counted.