A Czech language teacher and writer who posts English grammar explainers, language maps of Europe, and short essays on languages and statistics.
HN links it for its maps and language explainers, and commenters use it as a source on topics like record temperatures and English idioms.
That may be a part of it, but it's mostly due to homeownership. Germany is a super risk-averse country, thus few people invest their money. Most people hold everything in cash, thus they get very low returns. It's also the reason why they are hit so hard in a low-interest environment.
https://jakubmarian.com/wealth-per-capita-by-country-in-europe-map/
It's describing the median wealth based on a Credit Suisse Wealth Report
You can also find these results in the ING research ("Surprising differences between countries", page 14ff):
https://www.ezonomics.com/pdf/Household-wealth-in-Europe.pdf
"When dividing the Eurozone into a group of countries often labeled as ‘core’11and a group of Southern-European12countries, it turns out that Southern-European households are more capable of keeping up their standard of living compared with those living in the core countries (see figure 18)"
"It is striking that German households have fewer assets than Eurozone households have on average. They not only own relatively little real estate(see figure 20)but also hold less financial assets than is common in the Eurozone(see figure 21)."
German is not a pure SVO language rather it is classified as V2 (verb second language) in main clauses and SOV in subordinate clauses. At least I prefer to look at it in that - admittedly unsatisfactory - descriptive manner.[0][1]
There are some folks (like in Generative Grammar) arguing that it has an underlying SOV layer which makes kind of sense because it gets processed like half of the time essentially like pure SOV languages. But alas. In English you have to go through the extraordinary effort of a wedding ceremony in order to utter the words in SOV order: "With this ring I thee wed."
That is some pure SVO energy right here.
[0]https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/german-is-sov-should-it-not-have-been-ich-ein-berliner-bin
[1]https://jakubmarian.com/is-german-an-svo-language/
It apparently existed pre-Tolkien [not really surprisingly as it's one of those weird English plural forms that can go multiple ways] and there's at least some evidence that he retconned it as a deliberate choice. e.g. https://jakubmarian.com/dwarves-or-dwarfs-which-spelling-is-correct/
ADDED from the link:
Tolkien himself admitted that “dwarves” was a misspelling. In a letter to Stanley Unwin, the publisher of The Hobbit, he wrote:
"No reviewer (that I have seen), although all have carefully used the correct dwarfs themselves, has commented on the fact (which I only became conscious of through reviews) that I use throughout the ‘incorrect’ plural dwarves. I am afraid it is just a piece of private bad grammar, rather shocking in a philologist; but I shall have to go on with it."
440 is actually an international standard, not American.
>In 1939, there was an international conference held in London that resulted in a recommendation to use A = 440 Hz, as a compromise between the various tuning systems used at the time, some of which reached beyond 450 Hz. This recommendation was further supported by the fact that the BBC required their orchestras to tune to 440 Hz instead of 439 Hz because 439 is a prime number, and the corresponding frequency was hard to generate electronically with standard electronic clocks. Eventually, in 1955, the standard A = 440 Hz was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).*
* https://jakubmarian.com/the-432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-theory/
Not seeing the Romanian letters ș, ț, ă, â, î anywhere on the keyboard. Romania is in Europe, too.
(â and î are even needed in French, what am I missing here?)
I'm sure there must be many other letters missing. Not to mention Bulgaria and Greece.
No qualms with the layout, it's probably impossible to cram all European letters and common programming symbols on only ~four layers -- it's just the name that's somewhat provocative.
Interesting reference: https://jakubmarian.com/special-characters-diacritics-used-in-european-languages/
Yeah, it definitely seems wrong to me. B2B2 has twice the probability of any other event listed in that table.
edit: I guess it's more nuanced than that. The explanation and interpretation sections on this blog post [1] and on wikipedia talk about the controversy.
[1]: https://jakubmarian.com/the-day-of-the-week-boy-or-girl-paradox-explained/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_or_Girl_paradox