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Papua New Guinea's Extreme Language Diversity
- Papua New Guinea contains extraordinary language diversity with ~850 languages concentrated in a small population.
- A random pair of people there has a 98.8% chance of not sharing a language, complicating courts and schooling.
Why Euphemisms Keep Evolving
- Taboo vocabularies replace dangerous words to avoid invoking spirits or bad luck when harvesting.
- Euphemisms cycle as once-polite replacements gain negative associations and must be replaced again.
Cree Speakers Used As Wartime Coders
- Cree speakers in the Canadian army relayed secret battlefield messages because outsiders couldn't decode Cree.
- They coined words like "mosquito" for fighter bombers to name new war technology in Cree.