Incredipedia: Did you know

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When Will the Leaning Tower of Pisa Fall Over?

Experts say the famous tower at Pisa will lean for at least another 200 years. It may even stay upright — well, almost upright — forever. That's all thanks to a restoration project, which brought the tower back from the brink of collapse a decade ago.
From the first moment of its construction on unstable subsurface soils in 1173, Pisa's bell tower tilted farther and farther to the south. Its early-onset lean even influenced the way it was built, as its architects tried to compensate by angling the structure northward, resulting in its being banana-shaped.

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How Much Would It Cost to Build the Great Pyramid Today?

While the pyramid was originally built by 4,000 workers over the course of 20 years using strength, sleds and ropes, building the pyramid today using stone-carrying vehicles, cranes and helicopters would probably take 1,500 to 2,000 workers around five years, and it would cost on the order of $5 billion, based on manpower and cost of constructing the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River during the Great Depression. The dam contains a volume of concrete roughly equal to the stone in the pyramid. By comparison, the 1,776-foot-tall One World Trade Center being constructed in downtown Manhattan will cost an estimated $4 billion.

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The Hawaiian alphabet (piapa)

The Hawaiian language was first developed in the 1820s by Protestant missionaries from New England. Prior to contact from the Western world, Hawaiians had no written language other than petroglyph symbols. In order to convert all the Hawaiians to Christianity, they needed to standardize the native language and teach the locals how to read and write it. This goal was accomplished in 1826 in addition to the publication of a Hawaiian Bible.

The alphabet contains 12 letters: 5 vowels a, e, i, o, u (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū) and 7 consonants h, k, l, m, n, p, w (he, ke, la, mu, nu, pi, we). Plus a 13th "letter" called "okina" that is written with an apostrophe (').
The ' (okina) is a glottal stop and is considered a consonant; without it the meaning of a word is changed (ie "ko'u", meaning "my" and "kou" meaning yours.
Spoken Hawaiian on the other hand also has the letters t,r,v, b, and y sounds. The letters t/k, r/l, v/w, and b/p are interchangeable. Because some individuals pronounce "Hawai'i" as "Havai'i", or "kūkū" instead of "tūtū", when creating a written form, one of the two interchangeable letters from each pair had to be omitted. The "y" sound is written as "iā". Written Hawaiian and spoken Hawaiian don't always go hand in hand.