Article at Teleread called, “Is a famous ‘ancient Chinese curse’ really an invention from 1950? An investigation using Google Book Search”.
For many years TeleRead has been in the vanguard in advocating the creation of huge national digital libraries, ideally well-linked with each other and as comprehensive as possible. A natural and wonderful offshoot of large corpuses of digital texts would be search tools of unprecedented power.
Massive digital libraries would enable stimulating new methodologies for observing the evolution of language. Google Book Search isn’t TeleRead, but offers an enticing preview of the possibilities. Consider my recent search to examine the origin of one piquant and controversial expression—”May you live in interesting times”—described as an ancient Chinese curse.
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