Obscure Proto-Languages
This extinct language, reconstructed only through hydronyms, is hypothesized to have been spoken north of the Carpathians around 2500 BCE.
Answer: What is Proto-Balto-Slavic substrate (also called “Old European”)?
This rarely-cited 1971 paper formalized the earliest known gauge anomaly cancellation proof prior to Adler–Bardeen.
Answer: What is the Bouchiat–Iliopoulos–Meyer preprint?
This 12th-century Anglo-Norman document regulated pig foraging rights in royal forests under Henry II.
Answer: What is the Assize of the Forest (1184)?
This counterexample disproved Hilbert’s 13th problem for superposition of continuous functions.
Answer: What are the Vitushkin–Kronrod functions?
This rarely-implemented predecessor to ASCII included 6-bit control characters for telegraph switching.
Answer: What is ITA2 (International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2)?
The debated sister language of Proto-Indo-European proposed by Holger Pedersen—accepted by almost no linguists today.
Answer: What is “Nostratic”?
The renormalization constant Z_3^{-1} converges non-perturbatively in this obscure formulation of QED using Pauli–Villars regulators.
Answer: What is the Johnson–Zumino model?
The only known tax register from the Abbasid province of Ifriqiya that survives only through citation in a 14th-century jurist’s commentary.
Answer: What is the “Diwān al-Jibāya of Qayrawān”?
A 1964 construction yields this exotic 7-sphere, the smallest dimension in which exotic spheres exist.
Answer: What is the Milnor 7-sphere?
IBM’s 1959 standard for internal floating-point encoding used in the 704, preceding IEEE-754 by decades.
Answer: What is IBM Hexadecimal Floating-Point?
This hypothetical ur-language, suggested in the 1990s, attempts to link Basque with North Caucasian tongues.
Answer: What is Dené-Caucasian?
In ’t Hooft’s dimensional regularization scheme, this specific epsilon-tensor identity fails unless one introduces the HVBM prescription.
Answer: What is the “γ₅ in D dimensions inconsistency”?
This Byzantine rank, below protovestiarios but above koitonites, supervised candle-bearers in imperial ceremonies.
Answer: What is the kandylophoros?
This topological invariant distinguishes between certain 4-manifolds homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic, critical in Donaldson theory.
Answer: What is the Seiberg–Witten invariant?
This obscure programming language, built for naval fire-control systems, influenced some Ada constructs.
Answer: What is JOVIAL?