Shared Vocabulary Explorer

What are shared lemmas?

• Lemmas (dictionary forms) that appear in both the Estonian (ERAB) and the Finnish (SKVR, JR) runosong collections.
• These are words used across both traditions, revealing the shared poetic vocabulary of Finnic runosong.
• A lemma counts as shared when it occurs at least once in the Estonian material and at least once in SKVR or JR. The printed collection KR is not counted on the Finnish side here: its per-lemma figures were produced by a different method that files Finnish word forms under Estonian dictionary forms, so counting them would credit Estonian words with Finnish attestations they do not have.

Reading the scatter plot

• Both axes use a logarithmic scale (powers of 10). Each dot is one shared lemma.
• X-axis = frequency in the Estonian material (ERAB), Y-axis = frequency in the Finnish collections (SKVR + JR).
• The dashed diagonal marks equal frequency on both sides. Dots above it are more frequent in the Finnish material, dots below in the Estonian.
• Dot colour = part of speech (NOUN green, VERB blue, ADJ orange, and so on). Dot size = total corpus frequency.
• Click any dot to open that lemma in the lexicon.

Cognate pairs

• Estonian and Finnish word pairs with a shared meaning, identified from three signals: overlap of the English translations (55% of the weight), a matching etymological root (15%), and similarity of spelling (30%).

Frequency divergence

• The divergence panel shows shared words that are sung far more often in one tradition than in the other.
• The left-hand list ranks words by the Finnish-to-Estonian frequency ratio, the right-hand list by the Estonian-to-Finnish ratio.
• Such differences point to thematic and cultural emphases that set the two traditions apart.