ABSTRACT
The statistical treatment of the lexicon of New Persian is only in its infancy. Such investigations, at least as far as they consist of long word-lists, frequencies, tables and graphs, may seem superficial and meaningless to philologists who are accustomed to work with more comprehensive methods. Those methods, however, must in many cases be considered as combinations of many factors, including appreciations of frequencies and fragmentary contextual concordances, forming part of the general linguistic competence of the investigator. Without doubt such factors, if only intuitively, always play an important role in philological work. It therefore seems a worth-while task to isolate some of these factors in order to describe them in a more complete and quantitative way.
