Today, I’m reading chapter 3, and I thought I would extract keywords from that chapter using the tool available at https://www.reuneker.nl/files/keyword. Now, to index keywords, you need a reference corpus, because otherwise, you’d just get the most frequent words, which, in almost all cases, are ‘just’ grammatical words like the, a, he et cetera. Indeed, looking at the top 3 below, you immediately see what I mean.

Most frequent words in chapter 3 of The Evenings

In the keyword tool mentioned, you can select the British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference. That isn’t perfect, because it doesn’t match genre (newspapers vs literature) nor period, but as, again, it’s just for fun, let’s not get to picky about that. Pasting the third chapter into the tool and pressing ‘extract keywords’ gives the following results.

Keywords in chapter 3 of The Evenings

So yes, Dutch names are significantly more frequent in The Evenings than in the BNC. Not that surprising, of course, but if we glance over the names, we see words like said, which makes sense, because Frits talks a lot, and not only to himself. I was surprised to also see wortel (carrot) in the list, but this too is a name, introduced in a proto-bond like ‘My name is Wortel. Arend Wortel.’

Again, these little test are just for fun. One chapter is a bit short to do a keyword analysis on, the reference corpus isn’t perfect, and there are technical details concerning apostrophes and the like to deal with, but a brief quantitative look at a chapter just gives a nice and different little insight into a text many know so well.

Have fun reading today!