{"id":44,"date":"2013-03-13T03:37:23","date_gmt":"2013-03-13T03:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.williamtipper.com\/?p=44"},"modified":"2013-03-13T03:37:23","modified_gmt":"2013-03-13T03:37:23","slug":"from-the-wayback-machine-fragments-of-the-friday-quiz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.williamtipper.com\/?p=44","title":{"rendered":"From the Wayback Machine: Fragments of the Friday Quiz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Way back in the dark backward of time, I ran a website called (with customary lack of inspiration) the Wombat File. <\/p>\n

Short explanation for the name: I’ve always liked wombats.<\/em><\/p>\n

Every Friday on the File, I had a Quiz — no Googling, no asking your crazy-smart 8th-grader. First correct answer in the comments won bragging rights. Even though it’s a Wednesday, it’s a good one — a two part cortex-number from 2005:<\/p>\n

The official language of two countries which, taken together, have a population of seventy million people, is also spoken by some of the residents of a number of other countries. For the great majority of these people, though, it is a second language picked up in later life, and only learned as a mother tongue by a small proportion of its speakers, and in no nation is it spoken by all. Interestingly, the name of this language itself is, according to the linguist Nicholas Oster, derived from a word in yet another, far more widely-spoken language, which referred to the geography of the area in which the native speakers of the smaller language live.<\/p>\n

What is this language, and what is the more widespread language from which its name derives?<\/strong><\/p>\n

(It might be easier to play this one on Facebook — where I’ll also post it.)<\/p>\n

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