› added 7 months ago

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TIL English has 14-21 vowel sounds (depending on dialect), far more than the 5-6 of an average language like Spanish, Hindi, Telugu, Arabic, or Mandarin. This is why foreign speakers often struggle with getting English vowels right.

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WAnL TIL Kublia Khan’s niece Khutulun insisted that any man who wished to marry her must defeat her in wrestling and forfeit horses to her if they lost. She gained 10,000 horses defeating prospective suitors.
awV4N TIL a "magnitude 10 [earthquake] or larger cannot happen." Why? "The magnitude of an earthquake is related to the length of the fault on which it occurs. . . . No fault long enough to generate a magnitude 10 earthquake is known to exist, and if it did, it would extend around most of the planet."
ogRo TIL The Russian Civil War was so intense, their alphabet lost 4 letters by the end.
pRAA TIL The orange fruit was initially called a norange (from Arabic náranj), then the ‘n’ was dropped because people mistakenly thought the fruit was called 'an orange’. The linguistic change is called juncture loss.
rND5o TIL That as well as Warm and Cold blooded creatures, there's also a third type called Mesothermic to which some Dinosaurs may have belonged.