https://preview.redd.it/me9vdqe8wfx71.png?width=1159&format=png&auto=webp&s=80aabd21ef6550fab54fa5693db919563fd63b11
This is what I'm looking at: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the&year_start=1600&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=0#
It appears to peak near the mid 1800s, and has been generally declining since then (with a few short periods of relative increase). What's going on here?
Iβm sure weβve all seen the meme, but why is it that way
https://preview.redd.it/1xrt3b5f4rr31.png?width=1304&format=png&auto=webp&s=0354484ab6c035857b3c314800898909e913f691
Just something interesting which I thought I'd share.
The above graph shows the frequency of the usage of 'perchΓ¨' and 'perchΓ©' in books between 1500 and 2008. When I was just starting Italian, I always got confused about which one is correct. The accent is important because it means that it is pronounced [perΛke] with a close-mid front unrounded vowel (like the <ay> in 'may') not like [perΛkΙ] with an open-mid front unrounded vowel (like the <e> in 'bed')
It appears that 'perchè' was once very common but it is now considered a misspelling in standard Italian. You can read more about this at https://italian.stackexchange.com/questions/3896/why-is-perch%C3%A9-sometimes-written-perch%C3%A8-instead-of-perch%C3%A9
(Disclaimer: Wikipedia writes that "The data set [for Google Ngram Viewer] has been criticized for its reliance upon inaccurate OCR [Optical character reading], an overabundance of scientific literature, and for including large numbers of incorrectly dated and categorized texts.")
For example, the Wikipedia article on it has a nice table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ngram_Viewer, but I don't know how they got this data based on the results from the viewer results: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Wikipedia&year_start=1900&year_end=2020&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CWikipedia%3B%2Cc0 Any help would be appreciated.
