The Ngram Viewer database has been used to study
history and culture, primarily by examining the frequencies of words, within a
single or two languages (corpora). We examined numbers instead (specifically
years) across five different corpora. The years were 1799, 1865, 1917, 1945,
and 1948. The corpora were American English, French, German, Hebrew, and
Russian. Our analyses suggest that these years reverberate in specific
languages more than typical years, and therefore our approach can be used to
identify years with significant historical impact, within and across languages
(and by extension countries) and therefore may be useful in the field of
comparative history.
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