Username: ShadoWolf0913
What is one of your favorite facts? Reading some of the facts already posted about languages reminded me about this one: although they may sound completely different from each other, all human languages contain the same basic elements, such as separating words into nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Do you like to play trivia games, or merely stash away information for yourself? I love trivia games, although I don't play them very often. I'm always interested in learning random, useless tidbits about whatever. ^^
Other? Erm ... hiya! :3
Codeword so I can find them if things get a little busy.Sphye wrote:Silverhart wrote:So many facts to learn...
Learned this from Dictionary.com today:
As American English grew in the 1700s, Benjamin Franklin campaigned to remove C from the alphabet altogether, though his efforts did not gain much traction.
XD
How funny!
The letter "C" really doesn't have much of an individual purpose, does it? The only thing I can think of that it does that no other letters do is the "CH" sound.
Hmm, that's interesting. Now that I think about it, it's true that "C" doesn't have a unique sound alone. Most of its uses can be replaced with "S" or "K" and still sound the same. Poor little letter.
To through something else historical out there, Noah Webster didn't "invent" americanized spellings of words like some people think. Rather, the spellings "center," "color," etc. already existed as variations and Webster just favored them over the others for various reasons. He also promoted spelling other words like "feather" as "fether" and "tongue" as "tung," but those obviously didn't catch on.
Aaaand (last one for now, promise,) did you know that "bird" used to mean specifically chickens or young birds, and "fowl" was considered the broad term for all those feathered, winged animals? Over time, the word "bird" ended up taking over as the preferred term in common English, while "fowl" generally has a more restricted usage nowadays. In his 1828 dictionary, Webster (yep, him again) acknowledged the change and called it "remarkable," saying that "[t]he fact is precisely what it would be to make
lamb, the generic name of sheep, or
colt, that of the equine genus." In other words, he believed that it is improper to use "bird" as the general word, but it would seem we didn't feel like listening to him there.
I do have a fair number of non-language and non-Webster facts as well, but for whatever reason those aren't what's coming to mind right now. xD