h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

the primary flavour of cola drinks is orange. most folks have trouble accepting this because they are confounded by the colour. fanta was created by the nazis because they could no longer import the remaining ingredients to make a 'full' coke.

similarly, the majority of people cannot tell the difference between white and red wine when blindfolded, even tho they will report strong preferences in ordinary use of one over the other.

Until a couple of years ago, Scotland was the only county where Coke was marketed in which it was outsold by an indigenous carbonated beverage.

beer?

Ah. I meant 'carbonated *soft* beverage'.

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan (pop. of about 150,000,000), although only about 8 million Pakistanis speak it as their mother tongue. The mother tongue of about 40 million Pakistanis is Panjabi, which has no such official standing.

i once heard king Faisal bin Abdul Aziz (on a documentary) state that the jump in oil rices in the early 70s was a result of his realisation that coke sold for many more times the price of crude oil.

what was the scottish soft drink btw?

Up the 'Bru!

Ah...but that's a historical thing. Urdu and Hindi are both pretty much the same, except with different scripts. In Imperial times, they were both known as 'Hindustani', which was used as a lingua franca across the subcontinent.

I'll need to go check, but I suspect that even these days in India, Hindi is not a majority mother tongue - although, along with English it's the official language.

pakistan is an acronym. almost.

(P)unjab
(A)fghan frontier
(K)asmir
Baluch(istan)

Indeed! Much to the irriattion of the Bengalis.

According to my sources, there are about 40 million speakers of Urdu in India (the muslims) versus 200 million speakers of Hindi.

Sure they're close to each other, but don't tell them that.

But I still don't see how this relates to that official language thing, as there aren't many speakers of Hindi in Pakistan at all.

"whatever DO you call your right hand, if you are right-handed, or your left hand, if you are lefthanded)"

Well, my students are asking me why I do my 'ticks' back to front, so I tell them that it's because I'm sinistral. We then have to go into the meaning of this...

There are...but other than the tiny Hindu minority, they call it Urdu!

'Hindi is spoken mainly in the northern part of India, however it is widely understood all across India, except a few states of southern India by about 40 percent of the population.' http://www.oclc.org/languagesets/educational/languages/india.htm



It's not too far away from Swedish and Norwegian: 'Norwegian is Swedish spoken by Danes'

Yes, except that I read that the vocabularies of Hindi and Urdu in official circumstances do in fact differ quite a lot, as Hindi has taken a lot of stuff from Sanskrit, and Urdu from Persian and Arabic. The basic every day vocabulary is pretty much the same.

This is getting too Useful and Linguistic for this thread!

The hand which left-handers write with is called their 'dominant' hand.

the actor darryl hannah has an extra finger. this superfluity of digits is carefully masked by camera angles and hand positioning in her films.

Now that *is* interesting!

And Anne Boleyn had three nipples.

And Henry had her executed?!

So did Marlyn Monroe. It's called 'polydactyly'