I got 34/63, not counting the ones that obviously contained the answer in the sentence. Seems decent but I really don’t know jack about languages that didn’t originate in Europe, North America, or East Asia.
Yes, but how many monolingual Suomi or Magyar speakers are there in the U.S.? From what I understand, this is a list from a U.S. based provider of languages for which there are medical interpreters available. That’s going to depend on both supply and demand. For supply, there have to be sufficient speakers who have high fluency in both English and the target language, and are willing and able to work as medical interpreters. For demand, there have to be sufficient speakers who live in the U.S., are native speakers of the target language, and don’t have enough command of English to carry on a conversation with a medical professional. I imagine the number of native Suomi or Magyar speakers in the U.S. who might need to call the number but don’t have high levels of English proficiency would be vanishingly small.
It could be down to something as simple and random as the interpreter service putting out a general call for interested interpreters in a large number of languages and just happening to get a disproportionately large response from interested Romanian-speakers and a disproportionately small response from interested Hungarian-speakers, and not enough of the latter to offer it as a service.
I suspect, though, that it’s something more structural than that. Romania was more culturally and economically isolated, more Eastern-facing, more rural, less educated, and less economically developed than Hungary for decades. Even today, Romania is a middle-income country and Hungary is a high-income country. I’d bet that English-language proficiency is much higher on average in Hungary than it is in Romania.
I’d also bet that Romanian immigrants to the U.S. are more likely to than Hungarian immigrants to be lower-skilled, less educated workers, who are immigrating more or less on spec, and more likely to settle in ethnic enclaves.
On the other hand, I’d bet that Hungarian immigrants to the U.S. are more likely than Romanian immigrants to be higher-skilled, more educated, and generally more globalized individuals, with the language skills that go with that, who are immigrating for specific job opportunities, and are more likely to settle in more globalized and diverse tech and business hubs.
I don’t think the list is “for real” in any meaningful way - I think someone had fun making a long list of languages without really expecting most of them to ever generate a call. For example, Hawaiian - there really is no community of Hawaiian speakers who don’t also speak English. Likewise, while it is possible there are various Micronesians who don’t have particularly good English skills, modest English skills are universal, owing to the fact that textbooks are all in English and English is the lingua franca for the Federated States of Micronesia (which includes Chuuk and Pohnpei, though not the Marshalls).
What is the insert in reference to, by the way? I’m curious as to what would be sent every month with all those languages. The only thing I can think of is a health insurance bill (mine comes with a variety of languages), but somehow it doesn’t seem serious enough for something so important.
Can someone remind me where 14 K of G in a FPD originated? I know it’s the great unsolvable acronym puzzle of the Dope, but how would we know if someone actually solved it? After all, we can make up anything we want - 14 kilograms of gold in a four-piece diadem - for example. But there’s a “right” answer, isn’t there?
To summarize the “14” thread, the OP kept insisting that he would ask his “friend” that originally posed the question. After a few months, there was still no answer and the thread was locked.
That was a blast from the past, I am the person who posted the 14 k of g in a f p d riddle, just got an e-mail alerting me to this thread.
From memory it was a quiz my friend was given at a work Christmas party or something, all the other questions were simple and solvable (e.g. 365 d in a y) so I assumed this would as well. I never did get an answer from him so it will unfortunately remain a mystery. It wasn’t a joke or troll question though, I asked it in good faith.
