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Day: September 18, 2016
Why was literacy so low in the Ottoman Empire?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuz%C3%BBl%C3%AE Yes, Arabic script was a spectacularly bad fit for Turkish. But a more proximate reason, surely, was that mass literacy presupposes printing—and the Ottomans did not allow printing in a Muslim language. (They didn’t allow it in Christian Greek either, but at least Venetian printers were able to capitalise on that.) Global spread of […]
What does a French speaker from the Val D’Aosta region of Italy sound like?
Ah, French in the Val d’Aosta. I don’t have a phonetic answer for OP. I do however have a sociolinguistic answer that I’m delighted to share, because I co-supervised an MA thesis on this subject. The facts are all from Genevieve Foddy (née Czarnecki). The snark is all mine. The indigenous language of the Val […]