According to Wikipedia, Foreign bodies that fall down the trachea are more likely to enter the right bronchus because the carina of the trachea (a little ridge at the place where it divides into the two bronchi) lies to the left of the midline.

Someone on Quora linked to the Wikipedia article on the ‘Canaanite shift’:

In historical linguistics, the Canaanite shift is a sound change that took place in the Canaanite dialects, which belong to the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages family. This sound change caused Proto-NW-Semitic *ā (long a) to turn into ō (long o) in Proto- ( Read more... )

I just read that in French, HTTP sounds like acheter tes pets.

So I knew that "church" is "kos'ciol" (or something like that) in Polish and learned that it's "kostol" in Slovak, but didn't know that there was a similar word in Russian until I heard it today.

When I asked about the difference between "cerkov'" and "kostyol", I was told that the former is Orthodox while the latter is used, for example, for ( Read more... )

Listening to this clip on YouTube, right at the beginning she said aftermath with a BATH vowel in the final syllable.

Huh! I had always used TRAP there, as in maths. (But then, I’m not sure whether I’ve ever heard the word spoken before.)

Looked it up on dictionary.com; its house dictionary only has TRAP for the final vowel, but further down, the ( Read more... )

In Klingon, there’s an animal toqvIr lung translated as “Tokvirian skink”.

I thought that was a made-up word, but apparently, there really are animals called “skinks”. Huh!

(And they’re lizards, which makes sense, given that lung “loong” is described as a lizard-like animal. I presume the name was influenced by the Chinese word 龍 lóng for a ( Read more... )

Turns out that Edmonton and Hamburg are at nearly exactly the same latitude (around 53° 32' N), as I found out just now when I received a Postcrossing postcard from there. (Postcrossing plots the start and end on a map and draws a line between them, and I wanted to see whether the line just looked horizontal or whether it was actually completely ( Read more... )

Today, I found out that in Esperanto, “ĝis la revido” means “up to the dream-child” („bis zum Traumkind“). A curiously idiomatical phrase for a farewell :)

Fun stuff!

In Gregg shorthand (simplified), “thorough” is written th-e-r-o.

I would have used different vowels there, so I tried to see where those came from.

The first was easiest; I was expecting a STRUT vowel there, since I have STRUT in case such as “hurry”, but I have heard NURSE in such words from Americans. Essentially, I have “hu-ry” while they have ( Read more... )

So apparently Russian хлеб khleb “bread” is a loanword from Germanic, from a the ancestor of English loaf and German Laib.

I don’t think I would connected those three words off-hand. (Even though the English and German words at least mean the same thing! Perhaps because the word Laib is fairly rare in my speech; I usually talk about ein Brot ( Read more... )