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Einstein had a daughter whose life was recorded up to age 2, then promptly vanished. There are dozens of conspiracy theorists who claim relation to Einstein via her supposed existence today, the story being that instead of dying of the scarlet fever she contracted, she was adopted by another family, as was (supposedly) the Serbian custom of the time for illegitimate children. (Einstein's first wife was Serbian but Lieserl was born before they married.) A big reason there even is a conspiracy is because in 1935, when Einstein was writing letters of safe conduct for fleeing Jews who petitioned him for help, a woman named Grete Markstein, by all appearances an out-of-work actress from Vienna showed up at the door of a friend of Einstein's in Oxford claiming to be the long-lost daughter--decades before it was public knowledge that Lieserl ever existed, as the letters that attest to her birth and early life were in his safekeeping. She wanted her own way out, of course. The Oxford professor bought the story, apparently, but Einstein was skeptical. Not too skeptical, however, as he hired a private inspector to check into Markstein; what investigation was possible at the time turned up her 'accepted' backstory, though it is suspect and untraceable today. This is what the conspiracy hinges on: If Lieserl really did die of Scarlet Fever, then Einstein theoretically wouldn't have felt the need to investigate. Even if Grete Markstein was a hoaxer who made an immensely lucky guess--and not a friend of the real Lieserl's who was entrusted with her history for whatever reason--the idea that Einstein found his daughter's survival plausible enough to get the background check done implies to the people claiming descent today that she did live and was simply abandoned. I feel like the idea that the kid died and was simply never brought up again because of the tragedy is more plausible, but there's no conclusive evidence either way. Mister Olympus has a new favorite as of 01:02 on Mar 28, 2017 |
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Mar 28, 2017 00:52
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Subjunctive posted:Why wouldn't Einstein just have wanted to know more about who was scamming him, and how she knew about the daughter? I never said conspiracy theorists came to reasonable conclusions. e: I can't find it now, but I swore there was an article somewhere from a crank in (Poland? Czech Republic?) who claimed he was Lieserl's grandson and was on the verge of a unified field theory. Mister Olympus has a new favorite as of 03:48 on Mar 28, 2017 |
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Mar 28, 2017 01:25
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syscall girl posted:Christ: Knee-Deep in the Damned is a new one on me but sounds pretty intriguing. The idea is that he took that time to bring all the formerly-damned Old Testament figures back to Heaven because were only there because they predated Christ. It was a major part of the whole Jesus story in the medieval conception of things though; no idea why it went out the window.
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Oct 19, 2017 22:13
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System Metternich posted:miiiiiight be? I honestly have no idea about what is a calque and what isn’t There's a really easy mnemonic for this: The word "loanword" is a calque, but the word "calque" is a loanword. That is to say, "calque" was borrowed directly from French without an attempt at translation, the definition of a loanword, and the word "loanword" was translated from das Lehnwort, so it was calqued rather than loaned.
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Dec 7, 2019 18:33
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Kevin DuBrow posted:What makes the translations so funny? Are they just comically inaccurate? It's more that it's like an extreme eye dialect, from a point in time where eye dialect wasn't a writing convention. You can HEAR his accent in it and it's silly/charming. Though as a whole the translations are either "immediately clear with a very heavy accent" or "absurdly garbled, bears no resemblance to any words remotely involved" Mister Olympus has a new favorite as of 07:17 on Feb 14, 2020 |
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Feb 14, 2020 06:56
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Medenmath posted:Over that long a period, is "Latin" even really only one language? Is there an English dictionary that includes old and middle English words? Like does the Oxford English Dictionary contain words you only find in Beowulf or whatever? yes actually, the full unabridged OED that you get with academic access is THE source for etymology and historical spellings
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May 28, 2021 00:19
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wheatpuppy posted:I am unclear what you mean by "hard" and "soft" here. I learned these as voiced and unvoiced, respectively. So for me, eth would equate to path, meth, bath, moth, etc. While father, that, those, bathe would be thorn because they are voiced. that's half the problem, that people would use either for either and then have dialect variation on top of that. icelandic standardized them as thorn-unvoiced and eth-voiced
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Dec 8, 2022 23:49
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BattyKiara posted:Thank you, it was this one ŋ probably in phonetic transcription since the sound that represents in ipa is fairly common in languages you see on the anglo internet
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Dec 9, 2022 07:35
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i've seen "anglo-american" to refer to the general US/canada cultural continuum, as an equivalent to "latin-american"
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Mar 8, 2023 05:51
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preserved_Fish
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Jul 30, 2023 17:09
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I remember in elementary school one day they set up a kind of ellis island LARP in the gym we were supposed to go through as immigrants, where all the teachers sat behind stalls with gibberish names and yelled gibberish at us to simulate how none of us knew english, and we were roughly herded from place to place by other teachers pretending to be security. some of us got thrown in the fake jail
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Mar 29, 2024 04:24
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