The record for firing an arrow the farthest distance with a bow, is held by a man with no arms.
There are whales alive today who were around when Herman Melville wrote
Moby Dick.
Beneath the Nile is an even larger underground river.
On rare occasion, a location will be temporarily declared to be the territory of another country. The maternity ward in a Canadian hospital was declared to be Dutch territory so that a Dutch princess could be born there and legally be born in the Netherlands. There was also a court whose nationality was temporarily changed so that a specific trial could take place there (sorry, I don't know any details). A few soldiers buried outside of their home countries have also had their grave plot ceded to their home countries; e.g. there are graves of British soldiers on North Carolina's outer banks whose plots officially belong to the United Kingdom. I think the United States also owns the gravesites of its WWII soldiers buried in Normandy (as seen in
Saving Private Ryan).
If current demographic trends continue, it is estimated that by the year 3000 there will be no Japanese people left in the world, due to their low fertility rate. (I would also imagine that the world would be running out of Russians-- heck,
any white people for that matter-- by this time as well)
There is a language in Spain's Canary Islands that consists entirely of whistling. Not a bad idea if you think about it, any language without consonant sounds can be understood over longer distances (no doubt also the reason why yodeling was invented) and is a lot less likely to be misunderstood. Actually any time you mishear or otherwise fail to correctly understand another person's speech (i.e. asking someone to repeat something), there's a good chance you still heard the correct vowels, just not the consonants. People with hearing loss tend to miss distinguishing consonant sounds since the consonant sounds are higher in frequency. (One must wonder why there aren't more consonant-free languages in the world, if consonants are an obstacle to the comprehension of speech. Aeieaio uu iai eai oi eiioo auaao?)
I'll let the picture speak for itself for this next bit of trivia:
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7BhvH3IYAAps4u.jpg:largeA similar case could be made for some Chinese cities, even Shanghai.
You can determine the gender of an Icelander just by their last name. Men have surnames (er,
sir-names?) ending in -sson while women's last names end in -dottír. (The suffixes mean "son" and "daughter", of course.) I suppose that transgender Icelanders would switch to the other suffix?
Nobody knows who wrote
Beowulf.
Nobody is sure where the Basque language originated from. We aren't even sure if Japanese has any relatives. Ainu (the language-- and also the name-- of Japan's indigenous people) isn't even related to it. Most bizarrely, the language that has been found to have the most resemblances to Japanese is-- get ready for this--
Zuni, spoken in New Mexico by Native Americans on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
There is an aboriginal language in Australia that has no words for "left" or "right". This is significant because it forces its speakers to think of everything in terms of north/south/east/west. I'm not sitting in front of my computer right now, I'm sitting west of it.
This kind of lexicon may seem like it's making it unnecessarily cumbersome to communicate relative locations, but because their language forces them to imagine everything as north/south/east/west, members of the tribe that speak it are incredibly good at navigation. (And we call it the Sapir-Whorf "hypothesis".)
In some languages, especially in Asia, verbs have no tenses. The same form of the verb is used whether the action is happening in the past, present, or future. e.g. In 1985, Ronald Reagan is the President of the United States. Next week, I am 33 years old. etc.
This lack of tenses is believed to make Asians
better at planning for the future. It forces them to think of the future as something that exists, rather than something that doesn't exist yet. Heck, some astrophysicists think that "time" is merely a sensation experienced by the observer and that all points in time-- from the Big Bang to the heat death of the universe and everything in between-- dinosaurs, Jesus Christ, the Middle Ages, the disco era of the '70s-- exists simultaneously. Elvis is still alive, but in a time period that we aren't currently observing. The 26th century in which mankind is colonizing planets all across the Milky Way (or, alternatively, languishing on a decaying Earth ruined by their own stupidity,
Idiocracy-style) is already here. It always has been here, it's just that
we're not currently observing ourselves
there.
"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." -Einstein
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