Friday 24 March 2017

Friday's fact

In the course of wondering whether it was still OK to use the word 'eskimo', I took a look at a couple of wikipedia articles about same, a good part of which was given over to consideration of their various languages, following the long tradition of under-employed British army officers of old in the Indian sub-continent - where I understand that some hard-core Hindus are a bit cross that a lot of the serious books about their languages and culture were written by such people.

But I also learned that while the numbers may have been smaller, the Russian treatment of their original peoples in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries was every bit as bad, if not worse, as that meted out to the original peoples of what is now the USA, over much the same period. It seems that the Cossacks, traditionally used for the Tsars' dirty work, had a particularly bad reputation.

There are also some pictures of some rather unusual body armour.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo.

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