Development of Language Families

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1511: "I'll be home in 3 days; don't wash" Might be False Jan 31, 2019

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Check out the latest podcast on the Patreon for as little as $1: • It is very easy for misinformation to spread so long as there is a grain of truth to it, such as the line of ' let them eat cake ', which was probably never said by Marie Antoinette. Another such disputed quote is "I return in 3 (or 5 or 8) days; don't wash" said by Napoleon to his wife Josephine. This quote is more likely to have been written than that attributed to Antoinette as he did often write her love letters, but many of the original lines from which the now-famous quote could have been drawn are often contradictory or not so reliable.
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1509: Right-to-Left Lyrics in Sheet Music Jan 29, 2019

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Although there are many frustrations of writing in a non-Latin-based script in todays world, as discussed in the last two posts, but this is not only true of digital media. When it comes to writing music, which is traditionally written left-to-right, this poses a problem for those who write lyrics in a writing system does not follow that pattern. What people who write with Hebrew characters tend to do is to break up the word into syllables; each syllable is written right-to-left but the whole line is written left-to-right. However, those who write with Arabic letters—which by itself is a significantly larger population by up to hundreds of millions—will often, though not always, instead write the notes and every other musical notation right-to-left. See the last related two posts here: CrazyFont Arabizi Support Word Facts on Patreon here: Patreon.com/wordfacts
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1171: Terms of Venery Feb 22, 2018

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Names for groups of animals such as 'murder of crows', 'pod of whales', or 'tower of giraffes' are called 'terms of venery'; as the name suggests, they were originally when hunting (compare with ' venison '). Many of the names may sound silly to people now, and not unreasonably; there is no reason to memorize all of them, so in practical use people will opt for 'herd' or 'group' rather than saying other specific words, with a few exceptions for more common animals. It may seem that this is because we have less of a need to discuss animals nowadays, as few people need to hunt and farm than in the past, but before the 11th century, and in some ways even before the 14th century, nobody used terms of venery much anyway either. Considering that there would not have developed a hunting culture around, for instance, wombats (for whom a group is a 'wisdom') in England and France where these terms began, it should be reasonable t...
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