Please let me know if there’s a better linguistics sub that this belongs in!

Seeing someone use the term ‘nibling’ as a gender-neutral term for a sibling’s child got me thinking.

In English, we have both gender-specific and gender-neutral terms for immediate family members. Mother/father/parent (+grand), sister/brother/sibling. The gender-neutral and multiple version isn’t related to the masculine term, as it is in a lot of Romance languages (like padre - padres).

For non-immediate family, there’s usually only gender-specific - aunt, uncle, niece, nephew - for both singular and multiple. We don’t have a word that encompasses all of my aunts and uncles at once, for example. The exception seems to be cousin, which doesn’t have gendered options. Is there a linguistic basis for this? How did the English versions of these words/concepts develop, and why don’t we have separate terms for male and female cousins?

Sorry if it is a silly question but I cannot seem to find a simple yes/no answer. Did famous thinkers in late medieval Europe know the real identities of thinkers from the Islamic World such as Averroes (Ibn Rushd) or Avicenna (Ibn Sina)?

It seems like their ideas were popular, and debated, but did say students at Paris University in the 1400s know the two aforementioned thinkers were Muslims? Or from Asia/Africa? Or did they think they were from somewhere else? Thank you

I was wondering what happened to the illegitimate children of powerful Roman senators, generals etc, especially those with enslaved mothers. What sort of social status and life prospects might they have had?

I feel this gets rarely mentioned, but a big battle happens, lots of people die, the winning army marches on, but what happens to the remains of the battlefield? Were the losing soldiers scavenged, buried and/or burned? Was it done by members of the army or "locals". Are there records of big losses having a noticeable impact on the metal economy of a region (based on my knowledge, getting iron/steel required a lot of work). If the answer is too complicated long, I'd be happy to get pointers to more detailed sources.

In the film Clerks (1994)Dante and his girlfriend have a fight about sexual partners.

She says she has only had 3 while it later comes out that she has had oral sex with 37. She maintains that oral sex is only "fooling around" and not actual sex.

During the hearings about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998 Bill Clinton famously denied having a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. When it came out that they had oral sex on multiple occasions he also defended it by saying oral sex is not sex, just "fooling around".

Was this a common cultural attitude at the time?

I’ve been watching House of the Dragon, where there’s a sickly royal who dons a golden mask that covers half his face, to hide a disfigurement. It reminded me of Edward Norton as King Baldwin in the movie Kingdom Of Heaven, who wears an elaborate full face mask to hide signs of leprosy.

I couldn’t find any examples of real historical masks with a Google search. Do we know if this is something rulers have done in the past? Are there any surviving examples or depictions?

His legend has been around a long time. Although he’s changed overtime the core belief’s purpose and end goal is for year end reward. Was there ever a process for breaking the bad news to children. Asking as a parent.

I've seen a few different references to discovery in the early 18th century. It's strange to me that the seemingly small ocean gap between the old world and Alaska didn't allow for an earlier discovery of the Americas. I'd appreciate any insight into the topic!

Suppose I were a child of Byzantine nobility, and I was being educated sometime around the year 1000 CE. Suppose I asked my tutors things like “Who are we? How did we get here? Why have we lost so much territory? Will we ever recover the far-off regions of Gaul or the Exarchate of Carthage?”

What would I be told about what happened to the Western Roman Empire? Presumably I would learn about Trajan. I would learn that he spoke Latin, but my own emperor Basil II, and the rest of my peoples, are speaking Greek. How would that transition be explained? For that matter, would I be taught that Basil II was somehow “in the same line” as Trajan and the others from those long distant days of the old Roman Empire?

If I asked my tutors, “But why was Britannia (to name just one example) lost to the Empire? What was the reason for it?”, how would they answer?

I’ve read that the Byzantines never called themselves that. As far as they were concerned, they were Romans, and no less true Romans as their ancestors. But surely they must have known that something had changed. How did they conceptualize their own transition from what they once were to what they are now (meaning, in my example, the people of Constantinople in 1000 CE)?

Context: I know lots of American Natives died due to diseases brought from Europe but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Europeans dying from diseases of the Americas. Question: Was there a lot of European deaths caused by diseases native to the Americas? If not, can somebody explain why lots of American natives died and not as many Europeans? Wouldn’t both continents have equally diverse diseases?

In interested in if there was ever conflict, both between individuals of the same city/cult center and the centers themselves with other towns.

I recently learned that Maine used to be a part of Massachusetts from ~1650 to 1820, but I can't find anything that says why Maine was a part of Massachusetts.

I was looking at a map of El Alamein the other day and I saw that there was a contingent of South Africans in the British 8th Army. I'm familiar with how the United States army was not at the time integrated, but black American soldiers served in segregated battalions.

Did any black South African troops serve in World War Two? And if they did to what degree were they attached to the white South African troops?

Almost all large societies go through periods where they are conquered by invaders, the Persians suffered many conquests by the Arabs and Turks yet Persian society always survived and the conquerers would assimilate to Persian culture. The same applies to China, India, and more. When the Kush conquered Egypt, they assimilated to Egyptian culture, why didn’t this apply later on, and why is Ancient Egyptian culture extinct?