Pursuing Trivia

This is not about Trivial Pursuit, “the original trivia game that started it all.  …  Players roll a die and move along the track in any direction they like. When a player stops on a color[,] they get a question …” (boardgamegeek.com)
Our family used to play it as one of many board games we’ve owned.

By the way, here’s a current version I was not aware of:

“Star Trek 50th Anniversary Trivial Pursuit board game.  This collector's edition game features 1200 questions about all 5 Star Trek television series and the first 10 Star Trek movies spanning over 50 years with a collectible Galileo 01 Enterprise Shuttlecraft to store the cards, plus custom die.”  (30 bucks at shop.startrek.com)
Reminds me of my first year at the University of Utah, where I observed students watching "Star Trek" on TVs in the "study" hall.  I sometimes wondered how they could do that while focusing on their books.

Of course it’s about language, so I searched “language trivia” and instantly found this:

http://edl.ecml.at/LanguageFun/LanguageQuiz

["European Day of Languages" is 26 September; (sorry I missed it.)]

"To celebrate the European Day of Languages, we suggest a quiz to give you the chance to test your knowledge about the languages of our continent.

...

Miscellaneous - Question #1

Question: Who was the founder of Esperanto?

Ferdinand de Saussure

J. R. R. Tolkien

Naom Chomsky

Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof           

[Clicked:] Language Trivia

[For years, my younger sister taught Russian in high school, so I clicked Russian.]

Did you know this about Russian?

01 Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and is the native language of 142 million citizens of the Russian Federation, the world's largest country. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken Slavic language.

02 Besides Russian, there are 160 ethnic groups speaking about 100 different languages in Russia.

03 The Russian alphabet, known as Cyrillic, goes back to the ninth century. Its most ancient version was devised by two Greek missionaries – brothers Cyril and Methodius, both outstanding scholars and linguists. The alphabet assumed its modern shape in the 17th century under Peter the Great, while the written Russian of today was introduced by the Soviet government in 1918. The reform didn’t just simplify the writing but symbolised a break with the Tsarist past.  [In USA we spell it symbolized.]

04 Russia’s Cyrillic alphabet contains 33 letters, 2 of which have no sound on their own, but they carry grammatical meaning and are still considered letters.  ...

05 Over a quarter of the world's scientific literature is published in Russian. Russian is also applied as a means of coding and storage of universal knowledge—60–70% of all world information is published in the English and Russian languages.

06 Unearthed in 2000, the Novgorod Codex is considered to be the most ancient Russian book which dates back to the beginning of the 11th century. The wooden book with four wax pages was used for a few decades to record psalms and other religious texts.

...

08 "Bistro" a small restaurant or café could have originated from the Russian "bystro", meaning "quick" or "rapidly". The word may have been loaned when the Russian Cossacks occupied Paris in 1814, at the end of the Napoleon war. Russian Cossacks, who wanted to be served quickly, would shout "bystro". The French, supposedly, picked it up and adopted it as a name for their small restaurants with robust earthy dishes that later on conquered the world.  ...

09 Russian names generally consist of three parts: the first or given name, the patronymic, and the last or family name.  ...

10 The Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 1944) was established as a research center for Russian language and Russian literature ..."

(edl.ecml.at/LanguageFun/LanguageQuiz)

As many of us know, it’s easy to play and engage in an endless pursuit of trivia, but we don’t do that.  Too much work to do … amid so many fascinating facts to learn.