kodokan

How interesting. I know very little about modern astronomy, let alone its history. But do you really think people living BCE had any real notion of what they were looking at in the sky, and that they too were standing on a planetary body? It's difficult to imagine, given their unawareness of things like it being spherical, orbiting the sun, etc*. I mean, look what a surprise it was when America turned out to be on the either side of the ball (both to the Europeans and the Native Americans).

*youre going to tell me now that the Egyptians or Mayans or some such nailed this a millennium before Copernicus, aren't you 😄

Pulaski

The only surprise was that America was there at all. Explorers headed west were expecting to reach India. There is a reason why the islands in the Caribbean were named the "West Indies" and the natives of America were (mis)named "Indians". It was known as far back as ancient Greece, and likely further, that Earth is a sphere, and the circumference was calculated fairly accurately by the Greeks using the angles of shadows. The suggestion that anyone setting sail westwards across the Atlantic in the 15th and 16th centuries expected to "fall off the edge" is just a myth.

The revelation of Copernicus was that the earth orbits the sun, prior to that it was believed that everything orbited Earth, although Aristarchus of Samos had suggested a heliocentric model in the third century BC (only about 900 years before Copernicus ), but it didn't catch on at the time. Of course it is hard to be sure what exactly prehistoric man understood about the stars and planets, but the alignment of Stonehenge and other standing stones tells us that they were very much aware of the movements of the sun and undoubtedly other celestial bodies, and I find it hard to believe that people who clearly spent so much time and effort to track the moon and the sun had not worked out that we are standing on a sphere and observing celestial bodies spinning around us.

From the Wikipedia article on the history of astronomy:

ellio

have i landed on the planet of knobs

kimilseung

The idea of a round earth goes back about 2,600 years as far as I know, who knows how much further back without written records.

SultanOfSwing

Depending on how you land, that could prove to be quite uncomfortable.

The idea of a heliocentric system goes back almost as far as well. They knew their shit back then. I suppose when there's bugger all else to do at night (unless your wife was feeling cooperative), one spends their time looking up.

Pulaski

One spends his/her time .....

They spend their time .....

SultanOfSwing

When I wake up, I'll pretend to care.

lizzyq

FIFY

One spends one's time.....

Pulaski

I now care as much as Sultan does.

SultanOfSwing

Yeah, I'm a bit more awake now and I still don't care

amideislas

Well, I generally try to provide tangible evidence to support my views, which is sometimes contrary to what people want to believe and therefore, unacceptable.

And to make it worse, many objectors therefore have difficulty finding supporting evidence of what they want to believe (or simply can't be bothered), so it lends to the perception that I somehow think I'm always right, simply because it's not what they want to hear, and they can't prove otherwise..

However, it would be helpful if pedantics, strawman arguments and the final "you're a moronic tosser troll bitch" weren't considered to be credible final proof that they're right and I'm wrong. But you know what they say about opinions, so no worries, I don't take it personally.

have a nice day.

robin1234

In this case, though, the data from the Wikedia article about numbers of English speakers and numbers of Spanish speakers were a crock.

amideislas

Well, there you go - exemplifying my point - Wasn't what you wanted to believe? Well that makes it a 'crock' dunnit?

Still, although various research on the topic varies, it seems that there's an overwhelming amount of 'crock' to go around:

The 10 Most Common Languages

The World's Most Widely Spoken Languages


The Top 10 Most Natively Spoken Languages


The most widely spoken languages
The 10 most widely spoken languages on Earth…surprise!

Top 10 most spoken languages

And there's even a LITTLE quiz for you:
Can you name the 50 most spoken languages (by native speakers) in the world?

There's a lot more, but I don't want to piss you off.

Still, I reckon all that crock qualifies me as a "moronic tosser troll bitch" then?

SultanOfSwing

Did somebody turn over two pages at once ...

Pulaski

Except all of those figures show aggregate English speakers at less than the combined population of the US plus the UK, and sometimes less than the population of the US alone. I accept that there are substantial numbers of Spanish speaking hispanics, and a smLler number of Chinese who have retained a non-English speaking sub-culture, but I cannot believe that those non-Engish speaking minorities account for more than 10% of the population of the US, and perhaps 5% of the UK population. Taking those reductions would give us a number of very nearly 350 million, then add in the populations of Ireland, Canada, Australia, NZ, and a good part of the South African population, plus Jamaica and a number of other Islands in the Caribbean, plus the Bahamas and Bermuda, and the Falklands. Even allowing for the Quebecois and other non-English speaking minorities the number of English speakers in those countries must exceed 50 million, probably by a fair margin.

In short, I am not at all persuded by someone merely publishing a list of languages and numbers of speakers without some explanation of where the numbers come from. Specifically I would like to know what statistics were used to allow for non-Engish speaking minorities in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, and other countries, and whether any attempt was made to include English speakers in former British colonies notably in Africa?

Someone else (Robin?) also pointed out that at least some of the published figures for Spanish speakers appear to assume 100% of the population speaks Spanish in "Spanish speaking countries".