Georgian does have a well-defined notion of ‘syllable’, it’s just that it allows an unusually wide range of consonant clusters in those syllables [0]. If you want a language which really doesn’t care about syllables there are better examples, e.g. Gokana [1,2]

[0] https://www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/063_fulltext.pdf

[1] https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman/papers/2011-hyman-go...

[2] https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman/papers/2015-hyman-go...

Historically speaking, it seems to have been due to two independent coincidences:

• The falling together of object pronoun her and possessive her seems to date back to Old English, where the genitive and dative cases were both hire. I’m unsure how this originated, but they seem to be separate in Frisian (the closest relative of English) and were reconstructed as separate in Proto-Germanic, which suggests that it was due to regular sound change in the evolution of Old English.

• Later, it seems like the third person possessive pronouns were derived by adding ’s to the corresponding genitive forms (which ended up as the possessive determiners). So her became hers, but it had no effect on his, since that already ended with an ⟨s⟩.

Thus we end up with the paradigm of:

    |   | subject | object | poss pronoun | poss determiner |
    |---+---------+--------+--------------+-----------------|
    | M | he      | him    |             his                |
    | F | she     |       her             | hers            |

In the case you mention, I note that Huddleston & Pullum in their Cambridge Grammar of the English Language specifically call ‘some’ an existential determiner. As is usual with them, this is an insightful observation: you use ‘some ’ specifically in order to say that there exists some set of things drawn from some larger set or in some configuration. You say ‘there are some vendors in the street’ because you’re drawing attention to their existence in the street (and indeed ‘there is/are’ is the prototypical English expression for existentials). You don’t say ‘they are some vendors’, because the use of ‘they’ implies some specific group of vendors already known to both speaker and listener — highlighting their existence again feels weird.

(Of course, this analysis is still incomplete. At some point you simply have to list all the specific ways in which ‘some’ is used — which, indeed, is exactly what Huddleston & Pullum do. Furthermore I’m certain that there is some discourse context in which ‘they are some vendors’ would be natural, even though I haven’t managed to think of one just yet.)

(Besides, it clarifies the colour scheme — the red vs black went totally unnoticed to my colourblind eye.)

Contrast this with, for example, French, where the indefinite singular un(e) correspond to the indefinite plural des: La boulangerie vend des baguettes ‘the bakery sells baguettes’ (whereas English cannot say *‘a baguettes’). But as in Spanish, professions take no article either way: Il est médecin / Ils sont médecins. So all three languages are self-consistent, just in their own ways.

Indeed! Palmer counts ‘862 languages comprising 43 distinct families […] and 37 isolates’, (where an isolate is a language with no known relationship to any other family). I should add that the map you linked shows the branches of only a single language family, namely Trans–New Guinea — most of the other 42 families are in the grey areas. (Though due to uncertainties in historical linguistics, that map includes some groups as part of Trans–New Guinea which Palmer considers separate families, for instance Timor—Alor–Pantar [there part of ‘West Trans–New Guinea’] and South Bird’s Head.)

My preferred source for these things is Palmer’s Language families of the New Guinea Area [0] (part of the extremely comprehensive book, The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area). Page 10 has a nice map of language families and isolates.

[0] https://www.academia.edu/86071361/The_languages_and_linguist...

> a 1,000 metre climb over about 30 km takes you straight up onto the edge of the eastern highlands

i.e. because the Markham River provides a pathway from the Lowlands into the Highlands.

The paragraph you quote concerns a different proposition, as may be clearer if some of the subordinate clauses are elided:

> The reason why I believe that […] the highlands were functionally cut off, is that […] they themselves did not ever speak of or show knowledge of the highlanders. Similarly, when the highlanders first encountered Australians, they had no concept of the coastal people, or where the shells came from, or any further concept of the broader world.

> ``Pardon us, ma'am. Mind if we ask you a question?''

> Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded.

> ``Are you a Satanist?''

> Well, at least they didn't ask me if I liked to party.

> ``Uh, no, I can't say that I am.''

> ``Gee, ma'am. Are you sure about that?'' they asked.

> I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said, ``No, I'm positive. The closest I've ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo.''

> ``Hmmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there.''

And it continues…

The issue with this is that you can’t necessarily define ‘constant’ in a meaningful way. Being a density function rather than a point function, the energy irradiance from a source changes changes depending on whether you measure in terms of wavelength or frequency. I recommend [0] as an introduction to the problem.

[0] https://oceanopticsbook.info/view/light-and-radiometry/level...

It’s interesting to learn that Fraktur itself only dates back to the 16th century — the broader blackletter family of scripts goes back 400 years earlier than that, and was once used across the whole of western Europe.