Cool!

Harvard, Google map literary trends, seek God

"The word "God" peaked in usage in the world's books about 1830. "Women" overtook "men" in print after 1985. Sigmund Freud has gotten more ink during the past 60 years than Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein.

Researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., teamed up with Google Inc. to survey 5.2 million digitized books -- about four per cent of all the volumes published in any language -- to analyze language patterns and quantify cultural trends from 1800 to 2000."

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"Google, which has digitized 12 per cent of the 130 million books published worldwide, unveiled an online tool that enables users to track the frequency of words and phrases."

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"About 72 per cent of the database's text is in English, followed by French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian and Hebrew."

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"Studying word frequency, the researchers found that "men" was present in books almost nine times as often as "women" during the first half of the 19th century. The gap narrowed until 1985, when both words were used evenly, and by 1994 "women" appeared about 4.3 times for every 10,000 words, while "men" lagged behind at 3.3, according to the data."

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"Members of the clergy produced a greater percentage of what was written in the early 1800s than later, Aiden said. That may help explain why "God" peaked around 1830, when it represented 12.5 of every 10,000 words, he said. By 2000, its prevalence had dropped to 2.6 times.

'God' is not dead, but needs a new publicist," the authors wrote.

Year by year before 1950, the fame of Darwin, the 19th- century evolutionary biologist, was greater on average than that of the psychoanalyst Freud, the physicist Einstein or 17th-century astronomer Galileo Galilei. Freud then took the lead."

I wonder if the words "me, me, me" followed soon after?

And this is interesting:

"The research team, which included staff members from the publishers of Encyclopaedia Britannica and The American Heritage Dictionary, concluded that the English language absorbs about 8,500 new words each year. From 1950 to 2000, the lexicon grew more than 70 per cent. Dictionaries don't account for the extent of this growth and fail to include an estimated 52 per cent of the language, the authors wrote."

I wonder if "the lexicon" will now shrink, what with our language police and all.

And speaking of the evolution of language, here's a trend that I couldn't care less about:

Languages Are Vanishing. So What?

The sooner we all speak to each other, the better off this old world will be. And it looks like it's going to be English. The language of technology and commerce will win, as usual.

More here.

Do you remember when techie people were predicting the demise of books? Somewhat snottily, I might add.

Well. It ain't happening.

"If you doubt the staying power of books, try this: Put the words "read books" and "use computers" into Google's new database, and you'll find that books come out well ahead."

My personal habits aside, I'm glad to hear that.

PS: I remember reading several years ago that English was the most common language spoken on the earth, either as a first or second language and was the most common language being learned by non-English folks the world over, too. The reason being, people understand it's the ticket to economic prosperity. And that's just the way the cookie has crumbled. It has nothing to do with it being superior in any way. It's just an accident of history. In fact, I've been told it's one of the more difficult languages to learn, being that it has a vastly greater number of words than any other language, in part because it has absorbed so many words from other languages. Thanks go to the British Empire.