Real Facts That "Feel Wrong"

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To my Midwestern ears, the way Southern people speak actually sounds a lot like the way people from Boston speak (and yes, I've heard both, I lived in Mississippi for years and have been to Boston a few times).

There are more bacterial cells in your intestinal tract than there are human cells making up your body.

The average human brain weighs three pounds. That of Einstein weighed two.

Manute Bol averaged 5 blocks a game as a rookie.

It feels a bit less “wrong” if you bear in mind the previous regime was a long-lived dictatorship. The country missed the chance to let women vote at the “right” time because there wasn’t much to vote. Neighboring Spain didn’t do much better: women could vote in the Second Republic, in the 1930s, but it only lasted five years in full control of the country (three more if you count the civil war whose victors overthrew it), and then democracy only came back staggering after Franco died in 1975.

This came as no shock to me. There is nothing free or democratic about Southern Europe. Spain, Portugal, Italy...they were Catholic unfree dictatorships for centuries and still long for the good ole days.

The president of France is married to a woman 25 years older than him. And she was his teacher.

^^^she is quite well preserved and glamourous, though.

Some fish have teeth in their throats, connected to their rear gill arches.



Imagine if we had teeth in our throats and we had to brush them!

Also it takes specialized skills to BE a parasite. Like being a jewel thief. You have to specialized in breaking and entering, and then living in a specific species of hosts. So each free living species of animal (humans included) have a whole set of parasite species that specialize in living off of that particular species, and no other, so you have your set of parasites, your dog has another set, your parakeet another, and so on.

This is mainly because some dialects are considered languages, despite being mutually intelligible.

For example, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible but they are still considered to be separate languages.

Meanwhile, some people who live in the Great Australian Desert speak a very bizarre version of English that most English speakers have difficulty understanding, but we just call that Australian English.

In other words, the world of linguistics is full of massive double standards.

Wrong explanation.

That IS true:that linguistics is highly subjective, but that has nothing to do with why there are so many thousands of languages in the world.
Most of those are EXTREMELY distinct. As distinct as English is from Chinese. And also most of those languages are now on the verge extinction.

You have to remember that for most of human history we were stone age hunter gatherers who lived in tribe/nations of only about five hundred people each. And each had its own language. At the end of the Ice Age 11K years ago there were probably less than five million folks on the whole planet. But there were probably about ten thousand seperate spoken languages. Today there are seven billon people but only about 3000 languages not on the verge of extinction (and probably about 40 languages used a lingua francas over large parts of the world). What happened in between the Ice Age and now was agriculture, rising population, urbanization, trade, conquest, migration genocide, and general cultural absorption and assimilation by larger groups of smaller indigenous groups.

The nation with the most linguistic diversity today (biggest number of separate languages) is Papua New Guinea because New Guinea is only now emerging from the norm of most of human history: people living in separate Neolithic/Paleolithic tribes of only five hundred folks each, each with its own language.

^^^it would be interesting to see how the local new guinea languages differ from one another.

That would be interesting.

There doesn't seem to be much about that on the web. The 850 languages ("not dialects, but separate languages" as the nation's prime minister emphasized once) fall into two "radically different families". One are the Austronesian language family spoken by tribes on the coast and on the outlying Islands: Melanesian, Micronesian languages, which are distant cousins of other Austronesian languages like Malay and Polynesian.

Then there is the NON Austronesian languages -spoken by folks in the interior of the big mainland big island of New Guinea. This doesn't seem to be an actual "language family". Just a bunch of language that cant be lumped into anything else. That would be the interesting group to look at because some of those languages might go back to when anatomical moderns first left Africa in the Paleolithic. Modern type humans reached Australia via New Guinea before they reached places closer to Africa, like Europe (because places like Europe and high latitude Asia were owned by Neanderthals and Denisovans at the time).

I read once that one of 13 words traced all the way back to the earliest known human written language, was the word "good" [likely pronounced as "gooood"].

I dunno about that.

Always had the impression that the English word "good" is related to the Anglosaxon word "God". Back when the Anglosaxons converted to Christianity back in the dark ages (around AD 650) anything virtuous would be "Godly" in some sense. So the adjective for "virtuous" naturally became a word derived from the word "God" ( good).

The phrase "goodbye" is a contraction of "God be with you".

The earliest written languages are much older than Anglosaxon English. The Sumerians and the Egyptians were writing shortly after 3000 BC. I doubt that they had a word for "good" that sounded like our word "good".

But there are words in English that seem to go back to even pre Indoeuropean times. Like our word "milk" has cognants in nonindoeurpean languages (Arabic etc with words meaning "to suck").

Ofcourse that predates written language.

There is one Egyptian heiroglyphic still in common use today in the modern world. That Rx symbol for a pharmacy is actually a stylized version of the "eye of Horus" (Horus the Egyptian god).