Genuinely interesting stuff you learned at school/university/work

[MrsHathaway]

At a tangent from an otherwise rather tedious thread, some of us started talking about the history of the English language.

I did a paper called something like History and Structure of the English Language at university and honestly it didn't feel at all like work. The complicated bits have faded into the dusty corners of my brain, but some interesting snippets have remained within easy grasp.

For example, you can see a lot of the geopolitical history of the British Isles in what we now call English. Very basic words like low numbers (two, three) and natural features (sun, land, water) have their roots in our very earliest history and have scarcely changed since the Stone Age. They're also very similar to their equivalents in languages local at the time - northern European languages like Swedish, German, etc.

Place names come in odd clumps too - there are areas in eg Yorkshire and the Highlands which have very Norse names, and often there will be a geographical boundary between Norse place names and Anglo Saxon place names, such as a wide river or mountain ridge.

French came next, with the Normans in the eleventh century. A lot of our food words come from that period, including beef, pork, salmon, etc.

As English eyes looked further and further overseas we started adding more exotic ingredients to our kitchens and words to our vocabularies. Tomatoes, chocolate!

ANYWAY

We're often told that we won't use 90% of what we learn at school or even university, although we don't know which 90%. But I think it's almost always worth learning stuff for its own sake, if only because it's mildly interesting for one day or breaks the ice at one party where you happen to meet your soul mate.

So go on, what snippets have you retained from your years of formal education that are genuinely interesting in their own right? Can be a tiny thing or a major complicated theory, but it must be interesting - at least interesting enough for us to say "well, fancy that".

I'll leave you with this: in Japanese there was no word for "thank you". There were lots of ways of expressing gratitude, but no single expression in the European way. Then the Portuguese came, and suddenly the Japanese were trading with them. They used lots of hand gestures and gradually a kind of pidgin developed to allow them to communicate until there were enough on each side speaking the other's language. But one legacy from that time and that pidgin is a single-word "thank you" in Japanese: arigato. Which you'll notice is remarkably similar to the Portuguese obrigado.

Oh..and that came from my statistics degree.

The Monty Hall problem Gertrude?

Love threads like this

My degree was in chemistry some 30 years ago. One day we learned about dust explosions. Who knew that flour could be so dangerous? Something that would never have occurred to me but is in fact very simple and logical and can have devastating consequences. I've never worked in an industry where it could occur but it has come up in conversation a few times over the years, fascinating stuff.

Ok. It's very late and I am only awake because DD has just got into my bed, so I am now in a bed about 50cm shorter than me, so thus isn't going to be half as fascinating as Nicuagrian sign language but:

Until Franz Liszt came along, pianos in concerts were placed facing the audience. Liszt was very vain, so he turned the piano round so he was in profile to the audience, as he thought he looked better like that. (O Level Music).

Tides don't only have a daily cycle, but also a 21-yearly cycle. The highest high tides ramp up and peak every 21-ish years. This is something j need to know for work often (I design flood defences).

I don't think the car/goat scenario transfers to deal or no deal gertrude, because it's missing an important step. The car/goat scenario forces the host to open a box with a goat in it...they have the knowledge of what's contained in the box. It doesn't work the same for deal or no deal which is completely blind.

It's prior probability, DropYourSword. In the Monty Hall example the host has to open a door with a goat, but the probability the initial door hides a car is still one third. In Deal or no deal, the probability of picking the biggest prize is one in twenty. That doesn't change if that figure doesn't appear throughout the game. The knowledge you (still) have at the end, faced with two boxes, is that yours is very unlikely (0.05) to be the top prize, whereas the probability it's in the other box is 0.95.

I liked learning about the birth of Christianity whilst I was at drama college.

In effect, all the boxes opened during the game act as the door containing the goat.

The only thing that really stays with me from English Language yonks ago is the Great Vowel Shift when many local dialects became more similar, for reasons which now escape me.

I remember loving the fact that if we spoke to someone in English from hundreds and hundreds of years ago we wouldn't understand each other, but if they spoke to someone from the next generation, and they spoke to the one after, the message would be 'translated' down the years. The development of the English language is such a fascinating subject, but at Uni all I did was drink, take drugs & shag around. Talk about a waste of taxpayers money.

Are you sure that's right Gertrude. I can make the car/goat one make sense, and I could make deal or no deal make sense in my head if it were the HOST eliminating boxes. But I thought the entire point was that the host had the knowledge which door the car was behind so he couldn't choose that one. Meaning that if it were behind either door the contestant hadn't picked, he would be forced to open the only goat door. It's only in the 1/3 chance that the contestant picked the car that he could then open either goat door. But with deal or no deal, I don't understand how the prior possibility can come into it, because at that point it's just physical location on stage? There's no forcing of goats at that stage!

If we made it a world wide movement to switch to organic farming, there wouldn't be enough food to go around.
I'm probably naive but it completely shocked me that the world is so overpopulated.
Also, by 2050 we will need something like 30% more water, 50% more energy to keep up with world demand and the richest 80 people in the world will have the same combined wealth as the poorest 3.5bn.

I have some fun microbiological/biochemical ones (bear with me).

-If you have tuberculosis, the deposits it leaves in your lungs are called 'caseous'. This is because they are very similar in texture to cheese. Also, they contain live tubercules. You can never be peoperly 'cured' of TB, my microbiology lecturer told me.

• There used to be a theory that chemicals produced by a living body could only be produced by a living body; it was one of the special properties of life. It took the chemical synthesis of urea (and also its isolation from urine) to make people realise that this was not so.

-The Endosymbiont theory; the theory that mitochondria and chloroplasts (the tiny self-contained 'powerhouses' of animal/plant cells respectively) used to be free-living but instead became ensconced within larger cells and have been with us ever since. In fact I first heard about it in 2000 so it may be accepted as a proper Thing now

In language:

-The word 'Welsh' means 'foreigner'. Oh, the invader irony!

In medicine (found this out last week!):

-The first instance of leukoreduction (filtering out of white blood cells, a practice now widely used to reduce pathogen transmission risk) was in the 1920s, when Alexander Flemming (I think) pushed blood through a bent glass tube and some wadded-up cotton wool into a recipient. It's been refined slightly since.....

Wonderful idea for a thread!

Meh - my degree was in Eng Lit - so I can talk to you about critical analysis of 20th century romantic and gothic fiction etc, but not much useful in the way of facts!

I've learnt more spending 3mths in NICU with my twins! I know all about ventilation and the make up of breastmilk and how various drugs work on preemie babies etc...

I remember learning a really interesting fact about why we put the word 'then' at the end of sentences, even when it add nothing. For example, "How are you feeling about it then?"

It was something to do with the Newcastle area, maybe?? However, I have completely forgotten what it was even though I think about it often!

It strikes me that maybe one of the posters will know the answer??

Wow, what a great thread! I was just thinking about arigato/obrigato the other day and wondering if there was a connection, so interesting to realise that yes, there is!

The Monty Hall Problem bends my brain. I really struggle to accept it.

My contribution, from a developmental genetics module during my degree: if you remove the gene controlling eye development in a mouse embryo, and replace it with a gene controlling eye development from a Drosophila fruit fly, the mouse will develop a perfect mouse eye exactly like a normal mouse. Embryological development in animals is very, very old, and happens in the same way in pretty much everything. Mammals and insects are so different and yet we share this way of developing right down to the genetic level.

Another cool fact: when caterpillars are cocooned, they don't just grow wings to become adult butterflies. Their bodies liquefy first and then reform into adult butterflies.

Gertrude I read that car/goat thing in 'The Curious Incident'. It's fascinating.

Here's an interesting thing I learned at university:

Singers produce their vowel sounds differently depending on how high or low a note they're singing. That is, the pitch of the note fixes how fast air is moving from the lungs through the vocal cords* and the singer then has to alter the shape of the her mouth (jaw, throat, tongue, lips) to make the right vowel sound result.

So if you sing eeee on a low note you probably have a Joker smile and the back of your tongue lifted high towards your soft palate, but as you raise the pitch of the note your lips have to slacken off and tongue dips slightly, otherwise the vowel sounds kind of tinny and nasal.

And what caught my attention is that this varies by the natural range of the singer, more than the note itself, so that in a full choir singing in unison, the face shapes of the basses will be different from the tenors and the altos and the sopranos.

• cords because they are stringy. Vocal chords are when people sing several different notes at the same time, usually one each.

I did linguistics at A Level - my all time favourite subject. Should have done it at Uni instead of French.

I changed my username as I KNOW my sister will spot this immediately (hi sis!)

So, the most truly fascinating project I did at university that really got me to love what I was doing was a project on insect mouthparts! I was fascinated with how the different ways evolved to give what we have now. I am sure not fascinating for pretty much anyone else, but it probably was the first project that showed me that I can do research. It also made me miss my bus once as I was trying to catch a particular insect to study for this project grin

Ooh now yes I remember something another student told me she'd learned about how our hearing bones are descended from earlier jaw bones so we have a relatively inflexible jaw but good hearing. And when we have ear ache we can't tell if it's jaw ache!

I found language acquisition and language change really interesting at A level and did a partially linguistics degree.

It's fascinating watching children learn how to speak. Apparently there's a part of your brain geared to learning language that becomes less powerful around aged 8.

It's very difficult to say when we lose the ability to learn a language natively, but it does seem to correlate with the onset of puberty.

There are a very few "studies" where children were not exposed to language until after the posited limit, but they are extremely problematic because they tended to have been abused or neglected (see eg Genie) so it's basically impossible to say whether the delay or the abuse prevented the language acquisition.

However, it's definitely fair to say that language acquisition is far easier for younger children than adolescents and adults, which is why modern languages are far more usefully taught in primary school than secondary IMHO.

I loved reading about how we have an area of the brain that naturally imposes grammar rules, which ties in nicely with the Nicaraguan sign language story above. My boys display it all the time by saying 'I eated something' despite having never heard me or DH use such a construction; their little brains are imposing (clearly far more logical!) grammar rules than the ones currently in play. In fact it makes you wonder why we persist in imposing nonsensical irregular structures for generation after generation..... they clearly want to make it logical so why not let them?

Handbag, I loved Chomsky and LAD theory during A Level English Language
My uni had a big speech therapy and linguistics department and I used to sit in on loads of the lectures. Probably explains why I did so badly at my degree, but still remember loads about linguistics!

One thing that really sticks is that when someone uses your name a lot in a conversation, they are trying to assert control over you and the conversation.
I always notice it in business conversations, and arguments with DH
It is a really useful negotiating tool as well...
If you say 'David, my offer is XX' and then reply back 'Thanks Jane, I'll think about it', there is more of a power struggle going on
If they reply 'thanks, I'll think about it', they are backing down to you.

Very few people will realise they are doing it though

Ah well.

Why is it more logical to have a single morphological unit indicating past tense (-ed) than to keep the basic word and alter its vowels a bit (eat/ate)?

Answer: it isn't. We have inherited verb forms from all kinds of linguistic ancestors and the more basic the word meanings, the more likely it is the verb forms are irregular.

Look at "be", for example. Be, am, is, are, been, was, were - what kind of artificial intelligence would group those together? Particularly when you note than "been" can be a past participle for "go".

Chomsky is a very outdated model for child language acquisition. Linguists later observed that children don't make mistakes at random: they all make the same mistakes over and over again regardless of input source.

The more interesting model, of which I have embarrassingly forgotten the name, suggests that there are a very few possible settings for language and when a baby listens to speech it is trying to set its switches - prepositional or postpositional? Consonant clusters permitted or not? Tonal or not? This theory makes far more sense than the idea that each child is having to build an entire set of grammatical rules from scratch. And we note that some of these settings are very broad: so languages which do abc will also always do xyz, whereas cba languages will always do zyx; I have not retained the precise examples because they were complicated and technical and required intense revision!

At the moment my toddler appears to have some of his switches set wrong. He doesn't pronounce unstressed syllables or syllable-final consonants. He's got some of his switches on Japanese mode so we're toddling off to SLT to try to flick them back over.