Have you ever explored Google’s Books Ngram functionality? It displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books according to the language. The graph above shows the usage of “conversation” in English (combination of British and US English).
And here’s the Books Ngram for “conversation” en français:
is it reliable? have the compiled all the national libraries? Let's assume, they have, in English huge decrease of the word conversation in the 19th, and then 20th century , why? no idea.... and sudden increase (in French too)
The spike doesn't happen for all words which was my first suspicion (ie the proliferation of published works vous internet..,). I will need to investigate further on the integrity of this data.
A first thought strikes me that the country of the Salon and the land of l'esprit critique had its first spike during the Enlightenment at the end of the 17th century. It then stayed basically flat for 300 years before having a spike much like in English, presumably in conjunction with the Internet. However, I did check to see that not ALL words spiked in the same way. For example, "discussion" in English has been on a steady decline since 1952. Debate has been going down since 1999. And "dialogue" had a significant rise from 1950, but has been declining since a peak in 2009.
is it reliable? have the compiled all the national libraries? Let's assume, they have, in English huge decrease of the word conversation in the 19th, and then 20th century , why? no idea.... and sudden increase (in French too)
The spike doesn't happen for all words which was my first suspicion (ie the proliferation of published works vous internet..,). I will need to investigate further on the integrity of this data.
A first thought strikes me that the country of the Salon and the land of l'esprit critique had its first spike during the Enlightenment at the end of the 17th century. It then stayed basically flat for 300 years before having a spike much like in English, presumably in conjunction with the Internet. However, I did check to see that not ALL words spiked in the same way. For example, "discussion" in English has been on a steady decline since 1952. Debate has been going down since 1999. And "dialogue" had a significant rise from 1950, but has been declining since a peak in 2009.