Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Of course you should also get hold of some German speakers, not too many, not too few, and some German beer, not too many, not too few. That is the beer immersion method.

As for me, the name “Etruscan” (Этрусский) is enough. As with many Russian words, it’s a composite: “Et” (“Эт”) means “this is/these are”, while “ruscan” (“русский”) means, well, “Russian”. You can’t get a clearer message than that!

but I'm not going to link to them.

The global historiography simply can not permit the very thought that the Slavs (and, in particular, Russian) were not simply the inhabitants of Pripyat marshes in the early Middle Ages, but the direct co-tribesmen of the ancient tribe of the Etruscans, who lived in Italy in the II millennium BC, whose culture, as is commonly believed, laid the foundation for the Ancient Rome.

An amazing new Russian discovery: Etruscans are Russians (along with the discovery that the whole world was originally Russian). The most convincing argument that makes the case goes as follows:

Quote

The global historiography simply can not permit the very thought that the Slavs (and, in particular, Russian) were not simply the inhabitants of Pripyat marshes in the early Middle Ages, but the direct co-tribesmen of the ancient tribe of the Etruscans, who lived in Italy in the II millennium BC, whose culture, as is commonly believed, laid the foundation for the Ancient Rome.

Boy, someone's got an inferiority complex. Inventing a direct lineage to Rome is so a thousand years ago.

Another amazing discovery: According to Johannes Goropius Becanus, his home town dialect was the original language in paradise, because words in it are shorter than in Latin and Hebrew, and a name like Noah obviously comes from Flemish nood.

Finnish radio drops Latin news after 30 years

The last bulletin went out last Friday evening...

By calculating how much information every syllable in a language conveys, it’s possible to compare the “efficiency” of different languages. And a study published today in Science Advances found that more efficient languages tend to be spoken more slowly. In other words, no matter how quickly speakers chatter, the rate of information they’re transmitting is roughly the same across languages.

[...]

In the new study, the authors calculated the average information density—that is, bits per syllable—of a set of 17 Eurasian languages and compared it with the average speech rate, in syllables per second, of 10 speakers for each language. They found that the rate of information transferred stayed constant—at about 39.15 bits per second, to be exact.

We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages’ structural properties and their speakers’ neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture.