Description

Source

The source data was Google's web n-grams database which is released by Google under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence.

I created the two graphical curves with Google's ngram viewer copie d'archive at the Wayback Machine which generates a bitmap output. With Inkscape, I extracted the two curves from the bitmap and converted them to vector-objects, then I manually re-drew the grid and legends.

I set the ngram viewer to show the incidence of the words "laſt" and "last" in all English documents (including British and American) from 1700 to 1900. I actually entered the words "laft" (with a small-F) and "last" because Google's OCR technology misread the long-s as an "f". This has been corrected by Google since the creation of this picture, so to be able to make a distinction between the two kinds of "s", one has to select one of the 2009 corpora.

The ngram viewer allows the user to examine a sample of documents that were referenced by the search with the target words highlighted. I saw that the apparent minor peaks of short-s usage during 1700-1800 were largely not due to actual short-s usage, but due to the occasional use of a different OCR technology that was able to recognize the long-s as an "s" rather than an "f". This was particularly noticeable when the ngram viewer was set to look at American documents only, which gave unusably uneven curves from 1700-1800, partly because there are not enough American documents from that period to form smooth curves, and because of the usage of the better OCR on about one-third of the American documents from that period.

Conditions d’utilisation

Data from Google used to create this diagram:

Ce fichier est disponible selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Non transposée.

Vous êtes libre :

• de partager – de copier, distribuer et transmettre cette œuvre
• d’adapter – de modifier cette œuvre

Sous les conditions suivantes :

• paternité – Vous devez donner les informations appropriées concernant l'auteur, fournir un lien vers la licence et indiquer si des modifications ont été faites. Vous pouvez faire cela par tout moyen raisonnable, mais en aucune façon suggérant que l’auteur vous soutient ou approuve l’utilisation que vous en faites.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0CC BY 3.0 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 truetrue

With the proviso that the source data was licensed as Creative-Commons, I release the diagram itself as PD:

Moi, propriétaire des droits d’auteur sur cette œuvre, la place dans le domaine public. Ceci s'applique dans le monde entier. Dans certains pays, ceci peut ne pas être possible ; dans ce cas : J’accorde à toute personne le droit d’utiliser cette œuvre dans n’importe quel but, sans aucune condition, sauf celles requises par la loi.