By the way, that video was on food that a lower-middle class English vassal might provide to his knight.
It was:
a pea stew
brown bread
salmon
I’d take that any day.
By the way, I’m reminded of how, 200 years ago, oysters and lobsters were lower-class food. Now, again, I’d consider myself extremely lucky to dine on oysters and lobster with a nice rye loaf.
On the topic of experimental archaeology, which is what that video is about, I’ve read that the mainstream view was initially that straw-roofed houses would have had a hole in their roofs to allow the smoke to exit. However, this was disproven by experimental archaeology; if a hole was provided, too much oxygen could enter the dwelling and it caught fire.
Now I think, as well, of one of David Attenborough’s autobiographies where he related entering a straw-roofed dwelling, probably in the '50s or perhaps '60s. He said that there was a very great concentration of smoke inside the house, which would be expected by there being no hole in the roof.
The staples of the average peasant working the fields were bread, beer and bacon.
I wish I lived on that.
Oh, another interesting nugget is that apparently in England, in the Middle Ages, the “left hand taboo” applied. It was perfectly alright to eat with the fingers so long as those those fingers were on your right hand, the left hand being the one used for “wiping”.
This custom is still prevalent in India and probably many other places as well.
It uses six lots of 石, the kanji for stone. Jisho also supplies a secondary meaning “openheartedness”… there appears to be an allusion to rocks that are, in this case, not weighing one down.
I started to seriously study korean 8-10 years ago. Because of starcraft - 100 %. Now, i don’t even have hangul in my system (i think). Is there anyone interested in penpaling korean e-mails? I want someone to destroy me on my grammar and have a nice chat at the same time
Printing houses developed habits for spelling frequent words, often based on what made setting type more efficient. In a manuscript, hadde might be replaced with had ; thankefull with thankful .
There’s a lot more interesting tidbits, this is just one example
Today I spent 2 hours being distracted from my studies trying to pronounce the name of the Yugoslavian mathematician Stevo Todorčević (since I recently realised that I’ll probably have to give talks regularly and don’t want to mispronounce names, also it’s just fun to learn how to pronounce new sounds).
After struggling with the difference between č and ć, I made a bit of a breakthrough on a different front, since I think I finally managed to get my alveolar trill working! I’ve been able to pronounce the uvular trill for as long as I remember, as part of Dutch (my personal accent has a uvular trill, other Dutch people have an alveolar trill, even within the same dialect it sometimes differs from person to person), but the alveolar trill was so far the hardest thing to try pronouncing.
So, poll time:
I can pronounce an alveolar trill (Spanish or Russian rolling r)
I can pronounce a uvular trill (French or German rolling r)