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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • The last three third party candidates who won more than one state were Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Theodore Roosevelt.

    The first two won the south on account of regional anger at the civil rights movement.

    Roosevelt split the vote. 50.6% of the country voted for the Republican candidate or a former Republican, but the Democrat won a landslide with only 41% of the popular vote and 81% of the electoral college vote.

    The closest a third party candidate has ever come to winning is Breckenridge, who got 18% of the popular vote and 23.8% of the EC vote running as a Southern Democrat because the south didn’t like Stephen Douglas (who got 29.5% of the popular vote but only won a single state).

    Voting third party basically doesn’t work. Any time its been significant, it’s just caused a spoiler effect.














  • If you’d like to look up more about the origins of PIE, look up the Kurgan Hypothesis, which suggests that Proto-Indoeuropean originated on the steppes.

    Basically everything we know about PIE, we know from looking at its descendants. If a word appears in multiple unrelated branches, it’s probably from the common ancestor. Particularly if there’s consistent sound changes on one or more branches.

    For example, it seems that a lot of PIE words with a p morphed into f in germanic languages. So, given the English father, Dutch Vader, Old Saxon fadar, Latin pater, Sanskrit pitar, Old Persian pita, etc. we can figure out that father goes back to some original PIE word which was probably something like pəter.

    Similarly, we see similar words for salmon both in Germanic and Slavic. And in the extinct Tocharian language, the word for fish in general was laks. Lox originating only 1500 years ago means that the Slavic and Tocharian would be a pretty strange coincidence.




  • Yes, English didn’t exist 8000 years ago. Instead, there was a language called Proto-Indoeuropean spoken on the steppes of Ukraine. Just like how Latin spread and local dialects slowly became Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, etc., PIE spread out and its descendants became Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Latin, German, etc.

    Part of what happened over time was sound shifts. For example, PIE p morphed into an f in Proto-Germanic. Father and the Latin word pater go back to the same PIE root word, but father exhibits the sound change of p -> f you saw in Germanic languages.

    Similarly, Spanish has a sound change where f changed into h. So the Latin word fabulari (to chat) became hablar in Spanish and falar in Portuguese.

    The point of the article is that the PIE word for salmon, laks, by random chance didn’t really morph much in Germanic languages. So you have lax, lox, lachs, etc.

    Interestingly, the Old English word for salmon was leax, and that made its way into Middle English and early Modern English as lax. It died out in favor of the French-derived salmon, and then we borrowed lox back from Yiddish.

    It’s like if beef entirely replaced cow, then we borrowed back koe or kuh from Dutch or German.