With all that in mind, which is the hardest language? On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” Like Kwaio, it has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.
Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.
The 35-year-old Sicilian first showed up at a police station on Thursday (local time) asking to be arrested because he preferred spending the night in prison rather than with his family, but was rebuffed because he had not committed a crime, the Agi news agency said on Friday.
The man immediately went to a tobacco shop next door, where he threatened the owner with a boxcutter as he grabbed a few sweets and a packet of gum.
He then waited until police arrived to arrest him for robbery.
This 2,500 ton catamaran was built in the Netherlands and entered service in 1915. Kommuna began service in the Czar's navy, spent most of its career in the Soviet (communist) Navy, and now serves in the fleet of a democratic Russia. Originally designed to recover submarines that had sunk in shallow coastal waters, Kommuna remains in service to handle smaller submersibles, does it well and has been maintained over the decades to the point where it cheaper to keep the old girl operational, than to try and design and build a replacement.
Art doesn't get more primal than etching animal skins with a big knife. I don't do 'pseudo intellectual' I make art.
And that's it: no postmodern angst, no childhood issues. Just a guy with a knife and a sheet of leather. At the link, you'll find a gallery of his amazingly-detailed work.
Link via DudeCraft
"People's lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people," Perminov said.
Scientists have long theorized about asteroid deflection strategies. Some have proposed sending a probe to circle around a dangerous asteroid to gradually change its trajectory. Others suggested sending a spacecraft to collide with the asteroid and alter its momentum, or hitting it with nuclear weapons.
To consider more extreme approaches to punishing the guilty twin, the Court could order the twins separated so that the guilty twin may be punished. Even if this Solomonic option were possible in this case, as physiologically it appears impossible, this action raises grave Constitutional concerns. The Supreme Court has held that the body to be inviolate, providing slim exceptions to this rule as in the testing blood alcohol content, chemical castration, and the death penalty. This punishment smacks of the Sharia law practice of chopping off a convicted thief’s hand. Furthermore, it is hard to argue that separation would only punish one of the twins as each would be left immobile, one half of a complete body. Separation surgeries have some success as in the case of Jodie and Mary Attard (although this surgery was undertaken knowing full well that it would and did kill the weaker twin). Modern scholars estimate the rate of successful separation surgery at around 5% (see also the Bijani twins). With such dismal rates, sentencing conjoined twins to separation surgery would be the equivalent of a death sentence.
Deep valleys and unforgiving terrain have kept the different tribes of Papua New Guinea relatively isolated, so that the groups' languages are not blended together but remain distinct. While the country is thought to have over 800 living languages, some, like Abaga, are spoken by as few as five(!) people.
