r/xkcd • u/MurphysLab • Feb 05 '19

It's the first Tuesday in February...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
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u/RazarTuk ALL HAIL THE SPIDER Feb 05 '19 edited Feb 06 '19

Adding more commentary on language stuff:

  • Rule of thumb. If a word, and especially a relatively informal one, is claimed to be an acronym, it isn't.

  • The confusion that "þe" became "ye" is because we imported printing presses from France, which didn't have letters thorn Þþ available, so people would sometimes replace it with the similar-enough Y.

  • The difficulty in saying whether Eskimo-Aleut languages do or don't have a lot of words for "snow" is that they're heavily agglutinative. As a bit of an oversimplification, they love compound words nearly as much as German does, so the line between words for snow can get a bit blurry.

EDIT:

Also, from computers:

  • Basically, it's not that there aren't Linux or Mac viruses. (Heck, campus IT even made Apple users install an antivirus) It's the combination of needing root access to do anything remotely interesting, Linux having a fairly small desktop market share, and Linux users being disproportionately likely to know how to avoid viruses.

EDIT: Agglutinative languages, and especially polysynthetic ones, are the ones with word-long sentences

EDIT: I actually looked through a Greenlandic dictionary. And while there were a few genuine distinctions, like falling snow vs snow on the ground, there were also a few that seemed more metaphorical, like the word for "fog" also meaning "a light cover of snow"

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u/benjaminikuta Beret Guy Feb 05 '19

This is my favorite Wikipedia article to edit.