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I did some digging. Apparently the most commonly accepted interpretation of Snorri's references to Asia is that this was one of the ways he and his contemporaries (he wrote in the 13th century) coped with the dilemma of keeping the old stories alive (and in Snorri's case, preserving them for...

@Swammerdami apparently there is a Icelandic saga that claims an Asiatic origin of the Norse some 20 generations prior to the earliest historically tangible Kings. I'll see if I can dig up details. It's something like that mentioned?

Here's a recent paper suggesting that the Huns (or a politically relevant part of their elites it is likely the Huns were a multilingual confederacy before even entering Europe) spoke a Yeniseian language. The Yeniseian language family is represented by a single extant language, Ket, with an...

And half of the gold jewellery market (that's a conservative estimate) is arguably a financial market in disguise. More often than not, people don't buy gold because they find its shine so much prettier than that of silver or polished copper, they buy gold jewellery as a firm of savings and/or...

I take issue with calling precious metal coins "intrinsic value money", especially when it comes to gold. "Intrinsic value" seems to imply that the value is almost entirely driven by the demand created by an object's non- money uses. This does not appear to be the case for gold. While gold has...

It likely wouldn't matter though. We tend to forget how empty space is. A rogue planet wandering in the general direction of the solar system would likely cross through it in a single pass on a hyperbolic trajectory, unless it gets cast into a solar orbit by a close encounter with one of our own...

I think you might be equivocating between motivation and skills here. When you say that women tend to be more social, I believe we should interpret this as having a higher motivation to engage in social behaviours, not necessarily as being innately more skilled. On the other hand, when you say...

It's been a longstanding notion that Autism Spectrum Disorders are significantly more common among males than females, but I'm not clear in whether this is a real sex difference. There were prevalence studies from the 1980s that reported something like a 4/1 m/f ratio in autism/ASD diagnoses...

@bilby I can't say I've met Moroccan or Thai day labourers on this particular message board, but I having recently been to Thailand I can confirm that street vendors, moto taxi drivers, or fishermen passing their idle time on a smart phone is a regular sight there. I don't remember noticing...

As someone who used to do linguistics as a day job for part of their life and as someone who still calls themselves a linguist by training, I haven't encountered the term "phonesthesia" (or, equally possible, forgot all about it), but I don't find anything particularly objectionable about the...

Few of them speak English. That doesn't change the fact that having some kind of Internet access no longer identifies one as "rich" in a range of countries you wouldn't want to describe as "First World". That it still does in the DRC and Afghanistan tells us more about the DRC and Afghanistan -...

And my point is exactly that 2/3 of the whole population, including 90% in "3rd World" countries like Thailand or Morocco, use the Internet. So from a whole population perspective, saying "is you can access this forum, you're rich" is saying that 2/3 of the world's population including many...

That's a very liberal definition of rich. According to latest world bank data, around 2/3 of the world's population, including between 3/4 and 4/5 in what they call "Easy Asia and Pacific (excluding high income)" which I guess means Tonga, Laos, India and China but not not Japan, Australia or...

Off the top of my head, there are at least three ways shampoo sales can go up: more heads needing shampoo, more shampoo being used per head, and people being willing to pay a higher price per unit of shampoo. Only one of them entails more people, and only two an increased output in terms of...

Here's an example of "Latin with a stroke": with a bit of creativity, you can read "Aśaña", but the more you look, the wronger it gets. The "a"s are from the different fonts, and why does the "ñ" have a "m" as its base? It actually reads "crystal"

Yes, the nurse is making the assumption that the only relevant interpretation in context is the "where in your body" one, and the patient fails to understand its relevance and thus randomly picks between the two. Of course some misunderstandings are harder to produce in some languages because...

I more informative measure probably would have been access to electricity among specifically the rural population. For Morocco, that figure starts out at 10% in 1992 and reaches 100% in 2017. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.ACCS.RU.ZS?locations=MA

I'm not sure that's still true, though it will depend on how narrowly you define "poor", or "reliable". As of 2022, per the World Bank's estimate, over 91% of the world's population, including over 51% in sub-Saharan Africa, did have access to electricity. In many countries, that change...

Incidentally going to Thailand very soon for a few weeks of vacation. I was there 5 years ago and enjoyed it. I only ever learnt a few phrases of common courtesies and don't remember one of them. That must be because Thai is so hard! I remember "please" and "thanks" and "orange juice" in Greek...

Do you believe that African nations have no alternative realistic chance to acquire the means to birth control, unless their given them, for free, by the government of the United States of America? Methinks that's exactly the mindset bigfield is criticising.