Monday 7 December 2015

Christians sag, Muslims rise, Jews ever constant

Yes, I know that Google N-gram is not a perfect window on the world, but in the English literature over the last two centuries reference to Christian has fallen, to Muslim has risen, and to Jew is ever constant. Interesting to know which of those mentions was positive or negative.

ChristianJewMuslim 15

Something happened around 1920 to boost Muslim, very probably the Balfour letter of 2 November 1917. Pretty easy to fit dates to the subsequent rise of the words, but odd that creation of state of Israel has no influence on the mentions of Jews. At this point you can see the battle of civilisations, with a Muslim rise and a Christian fall (and perhaps a more recent Christian renewing of vows).

Let’s look at it a slightly different way:

image

As mentions of Israel rise, so do mentions of Muslim and Islamic.

Now we need a pointless variable which goes in a different direction, which then gives us sufficient material for a book. Terrorism turns out to be a lagging variable for Islamic. Atheism barely registers. Coexistence little better. Murder has the same frequency as Muslim, and Islamic rises to that level till all three are indistinguishable by 2008. A good story to be made out of that, no doubt. Weapons behave similarly.  After trying a few words which contributed nothing more, I recalled a conversation I had in King Henry VIII’s wine cellar with a colleague who had done long service in researching military psychology. Call him Simon. The venue is in the deep bowels of the Ministry of Defence building, and is one of the last remnants of Whitehall Palace, and conducive to reflection.  Talking to Simon about trauma reactions in the military he interrupted me, saying of something I had just said: “Ah, that’s a word that doesn’t get used any more”.

Have a look at the final picture:

Character of Christianity

   Judging people by the content of their character. Quaint.

5 comments:

  1. Dr Thompson, could you write a bit about last Protzko paper about fade-out effects of intervention programs? I have an impression that this paper actually provides arguments for solving Flynn effect puzzle (more demanding environment)...

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  2. Judging people by the content of their words: https://watson-pi-demo.mybluemix.net/

    Try it, it's fun!

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  3. Does ngram account for variant spellings? When I was a little boy, all the modern, progressive people spelled it "Moslem" and only old fuddy-duddies spelled it "Muslim." Then fashions reversed themselves in the 1970s.

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  4. Does ngram account for variant spellings? When I was a little boy, all the modern, progressive people spelled it "Moslem" and only old fuddy-duddies spelled it "Muslim." Then fashions reversed themselves in the 1970s.

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  5. Steve, ngram does account for variant spellings, cf en:Moslem,Muslim,Mohammedan

    Interesting, too: de:Moslem,Muslim,Mohammedaner

    Can't put a finger on it, but around 1940-45 something seemed to have happened... anyway, in Germany Moslem/Muslim is a shibboleth nowadays that tells apart the unwashed masses and racist imperialist white males from progressives.

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