{"id":456,"date":"2010-12-17T19:01:44","date_gmt":"2010-12-18T02:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/library.conlang.org\/blog\/?p=456"},"modified":"2010-12-17T19:01:44","modified_gmt":"2010-12-18T02:01:44","slug":"fun-with-the-ngram-viewer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.conlang.org\/blog\/?p=456","title":{"rendered":"Fun with the Ngram Viewer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just found the new <a href=\"http:\/\/ngrams.googlelabs.com\/\">Ngram Viewer<\/a> from Google Labs. This new tool allows for searches of specific words in Google Books and displays them as a graph. Playing around with some conlang-related terms, I found:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Poor <a href=\"http:\/\/ngrams.googlelabs.com\/graph?content=conlang&#038;year_start=1800&#038;year_end=2008&#038;corpus=0&#038;smoothing=3\">conlang<\/a> doesn&#8217;t even register.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/ngrams.googlelabs.com\/graph?content=Esperanto&#038;year_start=1800&#038;year_end=2008&#038;corpus=0&#038;smoothing=3\">Esperanto<\/a> shows a peak around the 1930s.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/ngrams.googlelabs.com\/graph?content=klingon&#038;year_start=1960&#038;year_end=2008&#038;corpus=0&#038;smoothing=3\">Klingon<\/a> peaks in 2001.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/ngrams.googlelabs.com\/graph?content=volapuk&#038;year_start=1880&#038;year_end=2008&#038;corpus=0&#038;smoothing=3\">Volapuk<\/a> (yes, sans umlaut) had it&#8217;s highest occurrence between 1880 and 2008 in 1898, with a steady decline since then.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One has to remember that two words typed in the search box without quotes can occur across sentence boundaries as well as in contexts other than the one intended. I tried the phrase <a href=\"http:\/\/ngrams.googlelabs.com\/graph?content=constructed+language&#038;year_start=1800&#038;year_end=2008&#038;corpus=0&#038;smoothing=3\">constructed language<\/a> and while it does have a number of occurrences pertaining to our favorite craft, it also has occurrences like &#8220;Certainly every science should seek for a well constructed language ; but it were to take the effect for the cause, to suppose that there are well established sciences, because there are well formed languages&#8221; (Elements of Psychology, 1834).<\/p>\n<p>In any case, it&#8217;s an interesting tool and just plain fun to play around with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just found the new Ngram Viewer from Google Labs. This new tool allows for searches of specific words in Google Books and displays them as a graph. Playing around with some conlang-related terms, I found: Poor conlang doesn&#8217;t even register. Esperanto shows a peak around the 1930s. Klingon peaks in 2001. Volapuk (yes, sans [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[117],"tags":[67,120,9,119,118,121],"class_list":["post-456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-online-resources","tag-esperanto","tag-google","tag-klingon","tag-ngram-viewer","tag-tool","tag-volapuk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.conlang.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.conlang.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.conlang.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.conlang.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.conlang.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/library.conlang.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":458,"href":"https:\/\/library.conlang.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions\/458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.conlang.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.conlang.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.conlang.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}