I’m starting a series of posts with short, simple tutorials on using Python for doing linguistics.

Via a roundabout route, I came across Heidi Harley’s interesting post on the frequency distributions of letters. Heidi muses:

I know it would be a supersimple programming problem to produce a list of letters and their respective percentage distributions in the headwords of any online dictionary database … but it’d be a biggish time investment for me to figure it out right this second.

This is just the sort of person I have in mind: I’d like to write some tutorials that help language geeks learn just enough programming to scratch itches without biggish time investments.

If this sounds like your idea of a good time, then the only step you have to take ahead of time is to make sure you have Python installed. You can learn how to do that here:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide

If you’re running a relatively recent Linux or Mac OSX, you probably don’t even need to do that, Python comes by default. If you’re running Windows just follow these download instructions:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Download

I can think of a lot of interesting little textual and linguistic questions that can be answered with a short Python program (10 to 30 lines, maybe). We’ll see if the whole concept has any traction…

If you’re a Python hacker and find this sort of thing interesting as well, and would like to post a related tutorial somewhere, feel free to use that little icon doohickey I made for no apparent reason.