Daniel sent us this one, and it's a perfect follow-up to what's been rattling around my head lately. He's listening to us talk aviation security, and it pulls him straight into the Strait of Hormuz — Iran playing the long game, squeezing the global energy supply, watching Western governments squirm as their populations get angry at the pump. But then he takes a hard left into something more fundamental. His late father was a petroleum engineer, worked for Halliburton, and Daniel realizes he knows almost nothing about the stuff itself. What actually happens between that viscous black goo coming out of the ground and the clear liquid you pump into your car? What are the different fuels, and what does the intermediate process look like? He wants the full chain, from sedimentary organisms to refined products.
I love this question because most people stop at the geopolitical layer — the chokepoints, the pricing, the strategic leverage. Daniel's asking the chemical engineering question underneath all of it. Also, by the way, quick note — today's script is being generated by DeepSeek V four Pro, so if anything sounds unusually coherent, that might be why.
I'll adjust my expectations accordingly.
Before you get too comfortable — let's actually start where Daniel's memory kicks in. His dad told him about exploratory well digging, sedimentary organisms, millions of years, and then people dig it up. That's broadly right, but the "millions of years" part has some nuance that most coverage flattens. The organic material that becomes crude oil isn't dinosaurs — that's the first misconception to clear up. It's overwhelmingly marine microorganisms. Algae, plankton, zooplankton. These things lived in ancient oceans, died, sank to the bottom, and got buried under sediment before they could fully decompose. The key condition is anoxic environments — sea floors with no oxygen, so the organic matter doesn't get eaten by scavengers or broken down by aerobic bacteria. Over tens of millions of years, that organic-rich sediment gets buried deeper under more layers. Pressure goes up, temperature goes up — you enter what geologists call the oil window, roughly sixty to one hundred twenty degrees Celsius. Below that, the organic matter hasn't cooked enough. Above that, you start cracking everything into natural gas. So you need this Goldilocks zone of temperature and pressure, sustained over geological time.
It's less "ancient dinosaurs in a blender" and more "ancient pond scum in a pressure cooker.
And the source rock — the shale or limestone where this organic material accumulated — isn't where the oil ends up. That's the second thing most people get wrong. Oil doesn't sit in big underground lakes. It's trapped in the pore spaces of porous rock — sandstone, limestone — like water in a sponge. And it migrates. Over millions of years, the oil gets squeezed out of the source rock and travels upward through permeable layers until it hits a cap rock — something impermeable like salt or shale that traps it. Without that trap, the oil would just seep to the surface. Which actually happens naturally — there are natural oil seeps all over the world. The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles are literally crude oil seeping up to the surface. People have been using petroleum from natural seeps for thousands of years. The ancient Mesopotamians used bitumen for waterproofing and construction.
Bitumen being the heaviest, thickest fraction of petroleum.
Right, and that's actually a perfect segue into the refining process, because what comes out of the ground isn't one substance. Crude oil is a mixture of hydrocarbons — molecules made of hydrogen and carbon atoms, arranged in chains of varying lengths. Some are tiny, like methane, which has one carbon atom. Some are massive, with dozens of carbon atoms in long, complex chains. The refining process separates these by boiling point. And here's where Daniel's question about the intermediate process really gets answered. The fundamental operation in a refinery is fractional distillation. You take crude oil, heat it to about three hundred fifty to four hundred degrees Celsius, and pump it into the bottom of a distillation column — a tall steel tower that can be up to fifty meters high. The column is hottest at the bottom and progressively cooler toward the top. As the vaporized crude rises, different hydrocarbon fractions condense at different heights based on their boiling points. The heaviest stuff — residues, bitumen, asphalt — never vaporizes at all and stays at the bottom. Then moving up, you get lubricating oils, then heavy gas oil, then diesel, then kerosene, then naphtha, and at the very top, gases like methane, ethane, propane, and butane.
It's literally a vertical temperature gradient, and each product condenses at its own level. Like a high-temperature sorting machine.
And each fraction has a different use. Let me walk up the column. At the bottom, the atmospheric residue — this is the stuff that comes off at temperatures above about three hundred fifty degrees Celsius. You can run it through a vacuum distillation unit to pull off more valuable products without thermally cracking everything, but what remains is the feedstock for asphalt and bitumen. Moving up, you hit the heavy gas oil range. This can be further processed into diesel and heating oil. Then the middle distillates — this is where diesel and kerosene live. Kerosene, by the way, is jet fuel. Jet A and Jet A dash one are essentially highly refined kerosene with specific additives for freeze point and lubricity. Commercial aviation runs on this stuff. Then lighter still, you get naphtha, which is the primary feedstock for gasoline blending. And at the very top, the light ends — refinery gas that gets used as fuel within the refinery itself, plus propane and butane that get separated and sold as liquefied petroleum gas.
Daniel's question about the difference between petrol and diesel — that's literally a matter of where in the column they condense. Different chain lengths, different boiling points.
Gasoline — petrol — is a blend of hydrocarbons in the range of roughly four to twelve carbon atoms per molecule. Boiling range roughly thirty to two hundred degrees Celsius. Diesel is heavier — roughly eight to twenty-one carbon atoms, boiling between about one hundred eighty and three hundred sixty degrees Celsius. That's why diesel feels oily to the touch and gasoline evaporates almost instantly. The molecular weight difference also explains the fundamental difference in how the engines work. Gasoline engines use spark ignition — a spark plug ignites a fuel-air mixture. Diesel engines use compression ignition — you compress air until it's hot enough that injecting diesel fuel causes it to spontaneously ignite. Diesel has a higher energy density per gallon — about ten to fifteen percent more energy per gallon than gasoline — which is part of why diesel engines are more fuel-efficient. But diesel also produces more particulates and NOx emissions per gallon burned, which is why modern diesel vehicles need complex exhaust after-treatment systems.
The numbers Daniel mentioned — ninety-five and ninety-eight — those are octane ratings, right?
Octane rating measures a fuel's resistance to knocking — premature detonation in a spark-ignition engine. Higher octane fuel can withstand higher compression before auto-igniting, which lets you design engines with higher compression ratios and more advanced ignition timing, producing more power. Ninety-five and ninety-eight are Research Octane Numbers common in Europe and Israel. In the United States, you see the Anti-Knock Index on the pump — that's the average of Research Octane Number and Motor Octane Number, which is why US pumps show eighty-seven, eighty-nine, ninety-one, or ninety-three. So Israel's ninety-five is roughly equivalent to US ninety-one. The octane itself doesn't add energy — higher octane fuel doesn't contain more energy. It just allows more efficient engine designs. Putting ninety-eight in an engine designed for ninety-five does nothing except cost you money.
That's a useful public service announcement right there. So we've got fractional distillation separating crude into these cuts. But I know there's more to a modern refinery than just a big heated column. What happens after the initial separation?
This is where refining gets genuinely sophisticated, and it's the part most people miss. The fractions that come straight off the distillation column are called straight-run products, and they're often not very useful in their raw form. Straight-run naphtha has terrible octane — maybe forty to sixty octane, nowhere near the ninety-five Daniel's putting in his car. The heavier fractions might have too much sulfur, too many aromatics, poor cold-flow properties. So refineries have a suite of downstream conversion and treatment processes. The three big categories are cracking, reforming, and treating. Cracking breaks large hydrocarbon molecules into smaller ones. The workhorse here is the fluid catalytic cracker — the FCC unit. It uses a powdered zeolite catalyst at about five hundred thirty degrees Celsius to crack heavy gas oil into lighter products, primarily high-octane gasoline blending components and propylene. Then there's hydrocracking, which adds hydrogen under high pressure — like one hundred to two hundred bar — to crack heavy fractions while simultaneously removing sulfur and nitrogen. Hydrocrackers produce excellent diesel and jet fuel.
Reforming goes the other direction, if I remember right — it restructures molecules rather than breaking them apart.
Catalytic reforming takes low-octane straight-run naphtha and restructures the molecules into high-octane aromatic compounds. It uses a platinum-based catalyst — sometimes rhenium too — at around five hundred degrees Celsius and moderate pressure. The output is reformate, which can have an octane rating above one hundred. Reformate is a critical gasoline blending component. The process also produces hydrogen as a byproduct, which gets used elsewhere in the refinery — in the hydrocracker, for example, or in hydrotreating units that remove sulfur from diesel and gasoline.
A modern refinery is essentially a giant chemistry set where every output from one process becomes an input to another. Hydrogen from reforming feeds hydrotreating. Heavy residue from distillation feeds the coker. Light gases fuel the furnaces. It's highly integrated.
That integration is what makes refineries so capital-intensive and so difficult to build from scratch. A new world-scale refinery today can cost ten to fifteen billion dollars. The last new refinery built in the United States was completed in nineteen seventy-seven — though there have been major expansions since. The permitting and regulatory environment makes greenfield refineries nearly impossible in developed countries. Most new capacity is being built in Asia, the Middle East, and India. The Jamnagar refinery in India, operated by Reliance Industries, is the largest in the world, processing over one point two million barrels per day. That's more than the entire refining capacity of many countries.
Which loops us back to the geopolitical layer Daniel started with. If Iran can disrupt tanker traffic through Hormuz, the crude doesn't reach refineries in Asia and Europe. But it's not just crude — a lot of refined products move through Hormuz too. The Strait handles about twenty to twenty-one million barrels of petroleum per day, which is roughly twenty-one percent of global petroleum liquids consumption. About eighty percent of that crude goes to Asia. China, Japan, India, South Korea — they're all dependent on Hormuz transit.
Reuters had a piece on this just today, actually. Oil prices are up with the fragile US-Iran talks sustaining supply worries. Brent crude was trading around eighty-seven dollars a barrel. The uncertainty premium is real — the market is pricing in a non-trivial probability of disruption. And it's not just the crude price. Insurance costs for tankers transiting the Strait have spiked. War risk premiums add significant cost per voyage. Some shipping companies are rerouting, though there aren't many alternatives. The only real bypass would be pipelines, and the strategic pipeline capacity in the region isn't enough to fully replace Hormuz transit. The East-West pipeline across Saudi Arabia — the Petroline — can move about five million barrels per day from the Gulf to the Red Sea. The Habshan-Fujairah pipeline in the UAE bypasses the Strait entirely, moving crude from inland fields to the Gulf of Oman. But combined, these alternatives don't fully cover what moves through Hormuz daily.
Iran knows this. That's the leverage Daniel's talking about. They're sitting on the northern shore of the Strait, and they've invested heavily in asymmetric naval capabilities — fast attack craft, naval mines, anti-ship missiles positioned along the coast. Their whole doctrine is built around being able to threaten the Strait without necessarily needing to close it entirely. The threat itself creates the economic disruption.
The Revolutionary Guard Navy operates separately from Iran's conventional navy and focuses specifically on this mission. Small, fast boats designed for swarm tactics. They've practiced mine-laying operations. They've harassed tankers before. During the Tanker War in the nineteen eighties, both Iran and Iraq attacked commercial shipping in the Gulf, and the US ended up reflagging Kuwaiti tankers and providing naval escorts. The dynamic today is different — Iran's missile and drone capabilities are far more sophisticated than they were forty years ago. Their anti-ship ballistic missiles, like the Khalij Fars and the newer variants with maneuverable reentry vehicles, pose a genuine threat to naval vessels and large commercial ships. The Houthis demonstrated in the Red Sea starting in late twenty twenty-three that anti-ship ballistic missiles and drones can disrupt commercial shipping on a significant scale, even without sinking that many vessels. The insurance costs and rerouting alone create economic damage.
Though I'd push back slightly on the parallel. The Red Sea disruptions were against container ships and bulk carriers in a relatively wide body of water. The Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest point is only twenty-one nautical miles wide, and the shipping channels are even narrower — two-mile-wide inbound and outbound lanes with a buffer zone in between. Tankers are effectively on rails through there. A determined mine-laying campaign combined with coastal anti-ship missiles creates a very different threat profile than what we saw in the Red Sea. The vulnerability is more acute.
That's fair. The confined geography changes the military equation. And the economic consequences of a sustained closure would be staggering. The US Energy Information Administration has modeled scenarios — a full closure could spike oil prices above one hundred fifty dollars a barrel within weeks. Global GDP impact would be measured in trillions. Strategic petroleum reserves provide some buffer — the US SPR currently holds around three hundred seventy million barrels after the drawdowns of twenty twenty-two and twenty twenty-three — but the SPR is a short-term tool. It can offset a disruption for a few months at most. And many countries have far smaller strategic reserves relative to their consumption. China has been building theirs aggressively, but the exact volumes are opaque.
The refining process we were talking about — that's the downstream piece that determines what actually reaches consumers. If crude supply gets disrupted at Hormuz, refineries configured for Middle Eastern crude grades have to either pay premium prices for alternative supplies or reduce throughput. Many Asian refineries are optimized for the heavier, higher-sulfur crudes from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. You can't just swap in light sweet crude from the US shale patch and get the same yields. The refinery configuration matters enormously.
That's a crucial technical detail. Crude oils vary dramatically in their properties. The two key parameters are API gravity — a measure of density — and sulfur content. Light crudes have high API gravity, above about thirty-one degrees. Heavy crudes are below about twenty-two degrees. Sweet crudes have less than zero point five percent sulfur. Sour crudes have more. Brent and West Texas Intermediate are light sweet crudes — easy to refine, produce a lot of high-value light products like gasoline and naphtha. The heavy sour crudes from the Middle East — like Arab Heavy or Basrah Heavy — require more complex refining. You need cokers or residue hydrocrackers to handle the bottom-of-the-barrel fractions. A simple refinery designed for light sweet crude would produce enormous amounts of low-value residue if you fed it heavy sour crude. So the physical properties of the crude matter as much as the total volume available.
Daniel's dad would have known this intimately working for Halliburton. Petroleum engineers are the ones who characterize reservoirs, figure out what's actually down there, and design the extraction strategy. The crude that comes out of different fields — even different zones within the same field — can have completely different properties. You might have a light oil zone sitting above a heavier oil zone, separated by impermeable layers. Understanding that heterogeneity is what reservoir engineering is all about.
Halliburton's role in the industry is primarily upstream services — drilling, completions, reservoir evaluation, cementing, hydraulic fracturing. They're the ones who make the wells work. When Daniel's dad was explaining hydrocarbons to a ten-year-old, he was probably simplifying a career's worth of complex geology and engineering into something a kid could grasp. And honestly, the sedimentary organisms to millions of years to digging it up — that's not a bad summary for a ten-year-old. The part he missed — the refining — is an entire parallel discipline. Petroleum engineering is upstream. Refining is downstream. They're connected but distinct worlds.
Let's talk about some of the other refined products Daniel might encounter, because he mentioned jet fuel specifically. Jet fuel is fascinating because the specifications are incredibly strict. It's not just "kerosene that burns." Jet A dash one has to meet specifications for freeze point — negative forty-seven degrees Celsius maximum — because at cruising altitude, fuel tanks get cold-soaked. It has to have a minimum flash point of thirty-eight degrees Celsius for safe handling. It needs specific thermal stability properties because modern aircraft use fuel as a heat sink for engine oil and hydraulic systems. The fuel flows through heat exchangers before it reaches the combustors. If the fuel thermally breaks down and forms deposits, you get clogged fuel nozzles and degraded performance. There was a whole issue a few years ago with certain jet fuel batches causing coking problems in engines.
The thermal stability specification is called JFTOT — Jet Fuel Thermal Oxidation Test. It measures how much deposit forms when fuel is heated under standardized conditions. And there are additives that go into jet fuel. Antioxidants to prevent gum formation during storage. Metal deactivators to prevent trace metals from catalyzing oxidation. Static dissipaters to prevent electrostatic charge buildup during fueling — because pumping fuel through hoses at high flow rates can generate static electricity, and you really don't want sparks around jet fuel vapors. And fuel system icing inhibitor — FSII — which is essentially a glycol ether that prevents dissolved water from freezing in fuel lines at altitude. Military JP dash eight adds even more thermal stability additives because military aircraft push the thermal envelope harder. The SR dash seventy one Blackbird used a specialized fuel called JP dash seven with extraordinarily high thermal stability, because the aircraft's skin heated to over three hundred degrees Celsius at Mach three plus speeds, and the fuel was used as the primary heat sink before combustion.
The SR dash seventy one also needed a special engine start process because JP dash seven was so hard to ignite at ambient temperatures. They used triethylborane — a chemical that ignites spontaneously on contact with air — to start the engines. You'd get a green flash from the exhaust when the engines lit off. Every SR dash seventy one start was a minor chemical spectacle.
Which is a great example of how fuel chemistry and engine design are tightly coupled. You can't design a fuel without understanding the engine, and you can't design an engine without understanding the fuel. That coupling goes all the way back to the refinery. When refineries make gasoline, they're blending maybe eight to twelve different component streams — reformate from the catalytic reformer, alkylate from the alkylation unit, FCC naphtha, straight-run naphtha, butane for vapor pressure, ethanol as an oxygenate in many markets. Each component contributes different properties. Reformate gives octane and aromatics. Alkylate gives clean-burning high-octane paraffins with no olefins or aromatics. FCC naphtha brings olefins that can contribute to gum formation if not properly treated. Butane provides volatility for cold starts but too much causes vapor lock in hot weather. The blender's job is to hit the octane target, the Reid vapor pressure specification, the distillation curve, the sulfur limit, the benzene limit, the aromatics limit — all simultaneously, while minimizing cost.
The specifications change seasonally and geographically. Summer gasoline has lower vapor pressure to reduce evaporative emissions in hot weather. Winter gasoline needs higher volatility for cold starts. High-altitude regions have different requirements. California has its own boutique fuel specifications through CARB — the California Air Resources Board — which makes California gasoline effectively a separate market that's vulnerable to price spikes when refineries have outages. When you hear about gas prices spiking in California, often it's because a refinery went down and there's limited ability to bring in replacement supply from outside the state because out-of-state gasoline doesn't meet CARB specs.
That fragmentation of fuel specifications creates real supply chain fragility. The US has something like fourteen different boutique fuel blends mandated by different states and regions. It's one reason gasoline prices vary so much state to state, and it reduces the fungibility of supply. In a crisis, you can't easily move gasoline from one region to another. That's a knock-on effect of environmental regulation that most people don't think about. The intent is cleaner air, which is achieved — no question that modern reformulated gasoline burns dramatically cleaner than the leaded gasoline of the nineteen sixties and seventies. But the trade-off is reduced supply flexibility.
Speaking of leaded gasoline — that's a whole chapter of fuel history worth touching on. Tetraethyl lead was added to gasoline starting in the nineteen twenties as an anti-knock agent. It was phenomenally effective at boosting octane — a few milliliters of TEL per gallon could raise octane by several points. The problem, of course, was that it put lead into the atmosphere on a massive scale. Atmospheric lead levels increased hundreds of times over pre-industrial levels. Lead is a neurotoxin. The phase-out of leaded gasoline, starting in the US in the nineteen seventies and completed globally only in twenty twenty-one when Algeria finally stopped selling it, is one of the great public health achievements. But it forced refineries to find other ways to boost octane — primarily through reforming and alkylation. The transition off lead fundamentally changed refinery economics and configuration.
The last country using leaded gasoline was Algeria, in July twenty twenty-one. That's remarkably recent. For decades after the wealthy world phased it out, leaded gasoline was still being sold across much of Africa and parts of Asia. The UN Environment Programme ran a campaign to eliminate it globally. The estimated benefit is something like one point two million fewer premature deaths per year, plus cognitive benefits from reduced childhood lead exposure that are harder to quantify but probably even larger in economic terms.
We've covered crude oil formation, fractional distillation, downstream conversion processes, product specifications, and the refining economics that connect back to geopolitical supply risks. Daniel asked about the intermediate process from ground to car, and I think we've walked that chain. But there's one more product category worth mentioning — petrochemical feedstocks. A significant fraction of crude oil doesn't get burned as fuel. It becomes the building blocks for plastics, synthetic fibers, solvents, lubricants, asphalt, and thousands of other chemical products. The naphtha fraction that goes into gasoline can alternatively be fed to a steam cracker to produce ethylene, propylene, and butadiene — the monomers that polymerize into polyethylene, polypropylene, and synthetic rubber. Roughly ten to fifteen percent of global crude oil ends up as petrochemical feedstocks rather than fuel.
That percentage is growing. As vehicle electrification reduces gasoline demand over time, refineries are increasingly integrating petrochemical production to maintain margins. The Chinese are building massive integrated refinery-petrochemical complexes designed to maximize chemical feedstock output rather than transportation fuels. The Hengli refinery in Dalian, the Zhejiang Petrochemical complex in Zhoushan — these are designed from the ground up to convert crude oil into paraxylene, ethylene, propylene, and other chemical building blocks. In some configurations, they can convert over forty percent of a barrel of crude into chemicals, versus maybe ten to fifteen percent in a traditional fuels refinery. It's a fundamental shift in how we think about crude oil utilization.
Which means even if transportation fuel demand plateaus or declines, crude oil demand for petrochemicals will likely keep growing for decades. The IEA and OPEC both project petrochemical feedstocks as the largest source of oil demand growth. Plastics, fertilizers, synthetic textiles — these are deeply embedded in the global economy, and they're harder to decarbonize than transportation. You can electrify a car with a battery. You can't electrify polyethylene.
Though you can make polyethylene from bio-based ethanol — Braskem in Brazil has been doing it at scale for over a decade. And there's growing interest in chemical recycling of plastics back to monomers, which could reduce virgin feedstock demand. But the scale is tiny compared to fossil-derived petrochemicals. Global plastics production is over four hundred million metric tons per year. Bio-based plastics are maybe one to two percent of that. The infrastructure and economics overwhelmingly favor crude-derived feedstocks.
Alright, let me try to synthesize what Daniel was actually asking. He's looking at the Strait of Hormuz, thinking about Iran and global energy leverage, and he realizes he doesn't understand the physical stuff at stake. What is oil, really? How does it become the different fuels we use? And I think the answer we've laid out is: crude oil is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons, sorted and transformed through an integrated series of chemical engineering processes — distillation to separate by boiling point, cracking to break heavy molecules into lighter ones, reforming to restructure molecules for higher octane, treating to remove sulfur and other impurities, and blending to meet precise specifications. The products — gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, and the rest — are differentiated primarily by their boiling range and molecular weight, which determines their physical properties and how they're used in engines. And the entire system is interconnected globally, with chokepoints like Hormuz representing concentrated vulnerability.
That's a solid summary. And I'd add one thing about the Iran dynamic specifically. The reason Hormuz matters so much isn't just the volume of crude — it's also the concentration of spare production capacity in the Gulf states. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait hold most of the world's spare production capacity — the ability to increase output quickly if supply is disrupted elsewhere. That spare capacity is the shock absorber for the global oil market. If Hormuz is blocked, not only do you lose the current flows, you lose access to the spare capacity that would be needed to compensate. It's a double hit.
The market knows this. That's why even the threat of disruption moves prices. The risk premium gets embedded in futures curves. Options markets show elevated implied volatility for strikes far out of the money — traders are pricing in tail risk. This isn't theoretical. In twenty nineteen, after the Abqaiq attack in Saudi Arabia — drones and cruise missiles hitting the world's largest oil processing facility — we saw the biggest single-day oil price spike in history. Brent jumped nearly fifteen dollars a barrel intraday. The market recovered relatively quickly because the damage was repaired and supply wasn't actually disrupted for long. But it demonstrated the sensitivity.
The Abqaiq attack took out about five point seven million barrels per day of processing capacity temporarily — roughly five percent of global supply. If a sustained Hormuz closure took twenty million barrels per day offline, the Abqaiq spike would look mild by comparison. And the strategic petroleum reserve responses that worked in previous disruptions — the nineteen ninety one Gulf War release, the two thousand five Hurricane Katrina release, the twenty twenty-two releases after the Ukraine invasion — those were calibrated to disruptions of a few million barrels per day for weeks or months. A full Hormuz closure is a different order of magnitude.
Which brings us back to Daniel's framing. Iran is playing a long game, and the Strait is their ultimate strategic asset. They're not going to close it casually — that would devastate their own economy and alienate China, their primary customer. But the threat of disruption, the calibrated escalation, the ability to raise insurance costs and create uncertainty — that's the leverage. And understanding the physical infrastructure at stake, from reservoir to refinery to fuel tank, makes the strategic picture clearer.
When you understand what it takes to turn crude into gasoline, you understand why supply chains are brittle and why geography still matters enormously in an increasingly digital world. You can't refine crude in the cloud. The molecules have to physically move through pipes and ships and columns and reactors. That physicality is what gives Iran its leverage, and it's what makes the global energy system inherently vulnerable to chokepoint disruption.
Now — Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The dual number in Slovene is the smallest grammatical number category still in active everyday use, and linguists consider it a surviving relic of the Proto-Indo-European dual that most daughter languages lost more than two thousand years ago. In the nineteen tens, the Slovene dialect of the Resia Valley in northeastern Italy was documented as preserving distinct dual verb forms that had already vanished from standard Slovene, making it one of the last refuges of a grammatical feature that once stretched from India to Iceland.
I don't know what to do with that information.
The Simpson Desert connection is going to have to wait for another episode.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. If you want more episodes, head to myweirdprompts dot com. We'll be back soon.
