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Things To Do Before You Die
Lu Xun writes "A group of British scientists has brought some meaning to our lives by providing a list of 100 scientifically-oriented things to do before you die. The suggestions include 'joining the 300 Club at the South Pole (they take a sauna to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F) or learning Choctaw, a language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is definitely true, the other for passing on material taken without checking from someone else.'"
Here's there website
From the site:
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I saw this article in The Mysterious Future, so I googled up this brief page with Choctaw examples.
Personally, I'd like to see some of that grammar come into common usage. At least, on Slashdot.
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From the article:
Above sea level? Since the Earth's oceans form part of that 20-kilometer bulge, "sea level" isn't a constant distance from the center of the Earth either, and Mount Everest is still the highest mountain above sea level (while there is no actual sea right below either Mount Everest or Chimborazo, the shape of its hypothetical and non-spherical extension around the globe, called the geoid, can be determined mathematically).
What they mean is that Chimborazo is the place on the surface that is most distant from the Earth's center.
As a member of the Choctaw Nation (my great-grandfather was an original enrollee), I'm proud that the language has been recognized as worth learning.
If you are interested, here is a link to Chahta Anumpa (Choctaw Language) classes via the Internet.
You can click here for more information about the Choctaw Nation.
I've wished to stand inside a dome on the bottom of the ocean, watching sharks swim above.
Visit the Bahamas. I don't remember the exact location (visited on a cruise) where you take an elevator down to the seafloor and then you can watch the reef life and sharks. Contact a sales rep for the Norwegan Cruise Line. They may have a brochure. Been there, done that. I personaly prefer to take a sub. The ones in the Cayman Islands were great (before Ivan pitched one ashore).
The truth shall set you free!
Choctaw does have two past tenses, but they are not differentiated in the way claimed. The regular past tense, written -tok (or -tuk in older orthogrophies) is used for completed events ranging back about a year. The other suffix -ttook is for events that were completed more than a year ago. Furthermore, events that happened within the past few minutes and are still relevent for the current situation are often marked as "present" (-h).
Choctaw, and a huge number of other languages in the world, also have what are called evidentials. These are suffixes that indicate how you know the statement is true. In Choctaw, there is a first-hand knowledge suffix -hlih, used when you have direct evidence of the claim (you saw it, heard it, smelled it, etc). There is also the suffix -ashah which indicates that you are guessing that it is true -- you have some indirect evidence, such as hearsay, or very circumstantial evidence.
Tense and evidentiality are definitely distinct, as you can find tense and evidentiality marked at the same time on the verb.
Checkout the papers by a Choctaw expert: Aaron Broadwell.
At -30, again, not much of a problem if you're shovelling snow - shovelling gives you a real workout.
Mind you, in high school I came in first in our version of the polar-bear dip - 5 minutes swimming in a lake with ice floating around. The runners-up were 30 seconds and 10 seconds. Sometimes the skinny nerd IS tougher.
Office Space.
100 degrees Fahrenheit used to be the body temperature of humans. They calibrated their instruments wrong, and so it actually ended up being 98.1 or whatever it is. 0 degrees Fahrenheit was the temperature of salt water freezing. This is water that was completely saturated with salt at 1 atm of pressure (sea level). The British figured it's easier to measure the temperature of salt water than pure water because getting pure water is very hard.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.