The concept of the 'avant-garde' in art — being ahead of its time — came from French military language.
Fact #7301
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Languages with no future tense have speakers who save more money — possibly because they don't distinguish future from present as strongly.
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The word 'nice' originally meant foolish or stupid in 13th-century English — its meaning has almost fully reversed.
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Tonal languages like Mandarin use pitch to distinguish meaning — Cantonese has 6–9 tones.
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Babies can distinguish phonemes (sounds) from any language at birth but lose this ability by 12 months, retaining only their native language's sounds.
Fact #5602 · Language
The oldest written language is Sumerian, dating to around 3200 BCE.
Fact #3436 · Language
Languages evolve continuously — Shakespeare's English is dramatically different from today's just 400 years later.
Fact #5633 · Language
Language shapes thought — the Pirahã's lack of color words means they perceive fewer color distinctions.
Fact #5611 · Language
The sentence 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' contains every letter of the English alphabet.
Fact #5704 · Language
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