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Armenian easily wins this.Armenian is distantly related to English. I say “distantly” because, rather than slowly drifting away from its relatives like most languages do, it’s paddling away at high speed. Unlike English or French, which have larger Germanic and Romance subfamilies respectively, Armenian has left any close relatives far behind.It began its life on the river of language as Proto-Indo-European, a language that spent the next few thousand years fracturing into lots of different languages, like Proto-Germanic, Proto-Latin, Proto-Greek, Proto-Slavic, and the unexpectedly competitive little Proto-Armenian. “Normal linguistic development be damned!” it exclaimed, and sailed off into the distance.We can start with some relatively normal sound changes. Armenian took all its p sounds and turned them into h sounds, and then it took all its s sounds and also turned them into h sounds. These changes might seem weird, and if you’re not familiar with the whole sound-change business they definitely are, but these sorts of things happen all the time. Greek, for instance, also turned all those s sounds at the beginning of a word into h sounds, which is why you have Latin septem but Greek hepta for “seven”.This has lead to a number of superficially bizarre changes, like the word for “father”, *pater in Proto-Indo-European, swapping its p for an h and its t for a y to become hayr. Alright, that’s not too weird, is it? Well, yes, it is, but it’s not that weird. But, not to leave anything too simple, Armenian used the same common sound changes to turn the word for “five”, *penkwe in PIE, into the word hing. It still means “five”, and it’s still related, but the sound changes it went through turned it into a completely unrecognizable number.Its most famous sound changes of all, though, are undeniably the ones involving w. Armenian has never been much for w sounds, and turned a whole whack of them into g sounds at one point. It hated combinations of a consonant and a w with a passion - and PIE had lots of these w-combination sounds, like sw in the word *swesor (“sister”) or dw in the word *dwo (“two”). Armenian wanted them out, and it would do anything it took to get rid of them.Anything. Even if that meant turning the w-combinations into completely different sounds that they should not have changed into. The sw and tw sounds got shifted to none other than the kh sound. *Swesor became khoyr. This is a very weird thing indeed. *Presgwus (“elder”), too, developed into the word erech for no good reason at all.But dw got the worst of it. As mentioned above, the word for “two” in PIE was *dwo, which is where we get the words “two” and “duo” from. If Armenian had behaved like a normal language, it could have kept the dw sound, or maybe turned it into a tw sound, or even a tv sound if it really wanted to (cf. Swedish två, also from *dwo). Alas, no, it could not content itself with the pitiful ranks of its phonological contemporaries; it turned the dw sound into erk.Erk.It turned the dw sound into the erk sound. Dwo became erku. Dweh₂ro-, “long”, became erkar. Where English has the perfectly good verb “dwell”, Armenian decided it should have argellum. This is an actual sound change that happened.With many of its w’s now gone, Armenian had a sudden change of heart: as much as it had loathed these sounds, it enjoyed their company. In a gesture of forgiveness, whenever tr or kr, tl, or pn sounds appeared in the middle of a word, it turned them into wr, wl, and wn sounds respectively.To give you an even better idea of just how extraordinary Armenian’s journey away from its siblings is, here’s the numbers from one to ten in Proto-Indo-European alongside their Armenian descendants. Every Armenian word here does really come from that PIE root, and with the exception of the word for “one” they’re all related to their English counterparts.One - PIE *sem, Armenian mek: PIE had two words for “one”: *oynos and *sem. Proto-Armenian pulled *sem out into grand *smiyeh₂-, then chopped off half the sounds again to make mi for number one. It proceeded to stick the multipurpose suffix -ak on for a good ol’ miak, and then compress the vowels to make the modern word for “one”, mek.Two - PIE *dwo, Armenian erku: As covered above, the dw sound inexplicably turned into an erk sound. This has left a lot of Armenian linguists very confused and been widely regarded as a bad move.Three - PIE *treyes, Armenian erek: Armenian threw away that first t and exclaimed, “Normal linguistic development be damned!”.Four - PIE *kwetwores, Armenian chhors: First it threw away the second of those wretched w’s, then shifted the kw to a puffy chh sound and stomped some of the vowels out.Five - PIE *penkwe, Armenian hing: To develop Armenian words, take your starting word, shift any present p or s sounds to h sounds, and stir angrily for four millennia.Six - PIE *swek’s, Armenian vetsh: The s had long run away in fear by this point, leaving a plain *wek’s whose w had unwisely still remained and was zapped into a v sound. The k’s was close enough to a tsh sound that it willingly ran over into that direction, entering vetsh into its final form.Seven - PIE *septm, Armenian yoth: The s had of course long since left. An enterprising vowel took its place, leaving eaptm. Armenian was by now reconsidering its views on w’s, so it turned that eaptm to eawtm, and then further on to eowthn. The entrepreneurial e saw its chance and became a consonant just as the second syllable fled along with a still-shaken w, leaving behind modern yoth.Eight - PIE *optow, Armenian uth: Armenian turned its p to an h and then got rid of it because it sounded funny. It turned the o to a u, scaring the final vowel. Worried for its fate, the ow fled; only an uth remained.Nine - PIE *h₁newn, Armenian inə: The *h₁ fell off as per usual, and the initial n jumped over to be with its twin, hence Old Armenian inn. Alas, that one n turned into a vowel under the lack of stress to become a schwa, the little “ə”: the barely-present vowel in system or about.Ten - PIE *dek’m, Armenian tasə: A few of Armenian’s more normal sound changes are the changes from d to t and from k’ to s, which are the ones that happened here to yield Old Armenian tasn. Eventually, though, the n collapsed into a schwa again; today’s Armenians count from mek to tasə.To answer your question, while you could name several languages with only one weird sound change to their name, Armenian wins the all-around freestyle sound-changing gold medal.Thanks for asking!

The (economic) development of nations has been a topic of interest for many centuries. In many nations, characteristics such as corruption, political instability and a lack of a functioning democratic system, lead to a stagnation of human development.There is one instance in which it is possible for a nation to develop relatively faster! This is called the Demographic Window of Opportunity (DWO). Take a look at the historical population pyramid of, for instance, Thailand:This is the Thai population in 1970. A large part of the population consists of children, who all depend on their parents. Now take a look at the population pyramid in 2017:Quite a different picture! Thai people started to have less children, which led to a large increase in the relative share of the individuals of working age in the population. Since these individuals have less people depending on them, they can use a larger share of their income for consumption, but also savings. Provided that the financial markets are sufficiently developed, these savings can be used for investments into critical areas in the country, such as the building of schools or infrastructure (roads, hospitals, et cetera), which would allow a developing country to develop relatively fast.But, the Demographic Window of Opportunity is an opportunity, as a nation does not reap the dividend of the DWO automatically. Additionally, it’s a window, as at some point the relatively large share of workers will turn into elderly people, which will increase the share of people depending on other people, and thus a decline in the previously gained savings. Take a look at the predicted population pyramid of Thailand, for instance:So, how important is this DWO on a global scale? Quite important! I invite you to take a look at a region-based map of the DWO on a global scale developed by the Global Data Lab (GDL) of the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands:The early-window phase of the DWO starts, according to the definition of the GDL, once at least 30% of the population is under the age of 15. Clearly, many regions, which are inhabited by millions of people, are in the DWO.So, are these countries ready for the DWO? In a policy brief I tried to answer exactly that question. I found that most countries are not. I assessed nations on five environments: healthcare, education, governance, economic freedom and women empowerment, and I summarized those findings in the following spider diagram after transforming all values to lie between 0–100:On average, the nations score relatively well on economic freedom (EF), healthcare access and quality (HAQ) and education (EI). The main bottlenecks are governance (WGI) and women empowerment (WE). Especially women empowerment shows low scores. This measure is based on the mean age at which a woman first gives birth.Thus, there is still a lot of work to do. But the potential fast development is definitely worth it! One key policy objective should be to not let the demographic window of opportunity pass without reaping its dividend.Interested? Feel free to ask more, or take a look at Turning Data into Knowledge, where you can find a substantial amount of information on developing countries, both in table-form and map-form.

Why is the English word “two” spelled and pronounced the way it is?The answer is lost in the mists of time, but here is the etymology of the word:two | Origin and meaning of two by Online Etymology Dictionaryhttps://www.etymonline.com/word/twotwo (adj.) - Old English twa "two," from Proto-Germanic *twa (source also of Old Saxon and Old Frisian twene, twa, Old High German zwene, zwo, German zwei, from PIE *duwo, variant of root *dwo- "two."