16

enter image description here

In the case of English, "she" was used much less than "he", and it still hasn't caught up. In Russian, it looks as if the translation of "he" almost didn't exist, until around 1915. What happened?

Yellow Sky
  • 26,107
  • 59
  • 102
Ngrammer
  • 169
  • 3

1 Answers1

28

Actually, the year is not "around 1915", but the beginning of 1918 when the orthography reform began. Before 1918 "он" was written as "онъ", and naturally before 1918 "он" was not used. Have a look: enter image description here

After 1918, Ъ at the end of words after "hard" consonants was used mainly by emigrants in their printed publications. All the instances of "он" used before 1918 that Ngram Viewer shows in its graphs are actually mistakes of the Google Books OCR.

Yellow Sky
  • 26,107
  • 59
  • 102
  • 5
    I think graph with all three pronouns is more informative. https://goo.gl/4GJYkA – Alissa Dec 02 '16 at 12:19
  • 4
    Also note that Google Ngram Viewer uses a 3-year smoothing window by default, which partly explains why the OP's graph seems to start climbing up around year 1915 = 1918 - 3. Switching to 1-year smoothing, or no smoothing at all, shows the sharpness of the change much more clearly. – Ilmari Karonen Dec 02 '16 at 13:23
  • @Alissa - I updated the answer as you suggested, thank you. – Yellow Sky Dec 02 '16 at 17:06
  • @IlmariKaronen - A good point! I absolutely agree with you. – Yellow Sky Dec 02 '16 at 17:49
  • Actually, ъ was after all consonants: плащъ, врачъ. – user31264 Dec 04 '16 at 02:32
  • @user31264 - OK, it was really used after Щ and Ч, but definitely not after all consonants, it was never used after Й. – Yellow Sky Dec 04 '16 at 02:43
  • Only because Й (и с краткой) was not considered a consonant. Today it is considered as полугласная согласная (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5) – user31264 Dec 04 '16 at 15:06