It began with a curiosity about why the ten most common verbs in the English language are irregular, even though the vast majority of verbs are regular. Their discovery, arrived at through data-mining several centuries’ worth of texts, amounts to a sort of linguistic natural selection: the more frequently an irregular verb is used, the less likely it is to be regularized over time. It was the Ngram Viewer, and access to Google’s vast library of digitized books, that enabled this discovery.
Mark O’Connell reads “Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture,” a new book by the scientists Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, founders of the field they call “culturomics”: http://nyr.kr/OBr9bg (via newyorker)
Yet another fine blog…. 😅 