Dataset for Temporal Analysis of English-French Cognates

Languages change over time and, thanks to the abundance of digital corpora, their evolutionary analysis using computational techniques has recently gained much research attention. In this paper, we focus on creating a dataset to support investigating the similarity in evolution between different languages. We look in particular into the similarities and differences between the use of corresponding words across time in English and French, two languages from different linguistic families yet with shared syntax and close contact. For this we select a set of cognates in both languages and study their frequency changes and correlations over time. We propose a new dataset for computational approaches of synchronized diachronic investigation of language pairs, and subsequently show novel findings stemming from the cognate-focused diachronic comparison of the two chosen languages. To the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first in the literature to use computational approaches and large data to make a cross-language diachronic analysis.