Month: December 2016

I did a rich assortment of off-colour Greek proverbs over at Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some weird expressions?

A tuthree more off-colour sayings. Which I’ve actually tried to use in English, with decidedly mixed results.

• Τα μεταξωτά βρακιά θέλουν και επιδέξιους κώλους. Silk undies require agile arses. One must be equipped to handle the challenge one undertakes.
• Η γρια η κότα έχει το ζουμί. The old hen makes the [best] broth. Mature women are sexually satisfying.
• Από της μυλωνούς τον κώλο μην περιμένεις ορθογραφία. From the miller’s wife’s arse, one expects no orthography. If someone is uncouth, they will act accordingly.
• There’s some just-so story associated, of how the miller’s wife sat on some flour, and her assprint left an omega in a context where an omicron was expected.

Some sayings on Greek impulsiveness:

• Κάλλιο γαϊδουρόδενε παρά γαϊδουρογύρευε. Better to tie up the donkey than to go looking for the donkey. One should take precautions and think ahead.
• Του ρωμιού η γνώση έρχεται ύστερα. A Greek’s knowledge comes later (attributed to Turks). Turks think that Greeks do not take precautions and think ahead.
• Όπου ο Θεός δε δίνει γνώση, δίνει ποδάρια. Where God does not grant knowledge, he grants feet. If one does not take precautions and think ahead, one ends up running around playing catch-up instead.

A lovely couplet on someone making no sense, that my uncle used to use at me:

• Από την Έμπαρο κρασί, κι από τη Βιάννο λάδι/ κι από το Μυλοπόταμο ένα σακί κρομμύδια. Wine from Embaros, oil from Viannos, and a sack of onions from Mylopotamos.

And maybe the best meta-proverb ever, in Tsakonian:

• Τουρ οργήνιε του γέρου να νίνερε, του πφούντε σι να μη σι νίνερε. Hearken to an old man’s counsels—not his farts.

Habib le toubib, what a tough question this is. There’s a reason I’ve put it off so long.

• I had some run up of development from 10 to 15, including teaching myself Latin, reading high school Greek literature anthologies, and working out calculus.
• Tried to be religious, gave up around 15, though still retained cultural affection for Orthodoxy.
• Much of my intellectual breadth, I picked up between 15 and 23. That includes music, language learning, literature, literary criticism, basics of history.
• That’s the time you have the time to learn. That’s the time you want access to a good library or three. (One with books in it.) That’s the time you learn more than what your lecturers teach you.
• It helped that I didn’t particularly care about engineering, so I had some spare intellectual energy to devote.
• From 23 to 28, I was laser focused on being a linguist. I gained an encyclopaedic knowledge of much Greek dialect.
• I wrote linguistics papers intermittently from 28 to 36. That was wonderful in some ways, working through problems. In other ways, it was immensely frustrating: I really didn’t have much of an audience.
• From 36 on, I’ve had a day job outside of university. In some ways I’ve atrophied away from it; Quora came up at the right time. Making a point of exposing myself to new stuff.
• Stopped reading around 35. The interwebs have destroyed my ability to focus on extended prose. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.
• I was a fairly unreflective leftist in my youth, socially and economically. I’ve become more centrist economically, and have made my peace with the Market. I think I am more moderate socially, but that’s actually more about acknowledging my conservative roots than about my actual attitudes.

Was that the kind of thing you were after, Habib?

Ah, an utterly unscientific survey on Scottish accents.

I find Scottish accents sexy.

I find Glaswegian accents unintelligible and sexy.

Taggart was a formative experience in my upbringing. For years, I’d imitate him picking up the phone:

Halloo! Thes ez Tahghaghrt! … Whü?!

I don’t know that this has really attracted the interest of typologists, though I’m happy to be corrected. The phonologist I used to work for as a research assistant was considering writing an article, comparing the speed of newcasts, but I don’t think he went ahead with it.

I think the impression we have that Spanish is faster than Swiss German is real; but Roger Hughes is quite right that there will be extensive variation, not just between speakers, but also between registers, genres, and emotions. It’d be averageable, and measurable especially within the same genre (which is why my boss wanted to use newscasts). But I haven’t noticed it becoming a thing with linguists.

The real distinction linguists make, as Roger also points out, is syllable-timed vs stress-timed languages, which is a phonological, not a quantifiable phonetic attribute. That one actually surfaces a lot here on Quora.

Not getting an answer online, or in Patrick Hanks’ The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland .

I do get this from Wells, J. C. (2000), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary: Odd pronunciations of proper names – examples: there are four recorded pronunciations of Featherstonhaugh:

/ˈfɛð ərst ən hɔː/ (Featherstonhaw)

/ˈfiːst ən heɪ/ (Feestonhay)

/ˈfɛst ən hɔː/ (Festonhaw)

/ˈfæn ʃɔː/ (Fanshaw)

Let’s us out Feestunhay, which is something else going on, presumably dialectal. We have fɛðərstənhɔː > ˈfɛstənhɔː , eliding the second syllable. So now we need to get from Festonhaw to Fanshaw.

John Gragson’s answer to How did the surname “Featherstonhaugh” get its completely unintuitive pronunciation? is pretty damn ingenious, and I commend him for it. But there’s one factor it misses. It’s just a hint in Hanks’ dictionary, under the entry for Featherstonhaugh: “the surname is often pronounced Fanshaw and may have been confused with Fanshawe.”

Fanshawe is a distinct, equally old surname, deriving from fane ‘a temple or church’ and shaw, ‘a small wood or grove’.

So Festonhaw, which is the recorded shortening of Featherstonhaugh, was somehow garbled further to something like Fesnaw or Feshnaw, as John argues. And then—rather than appeal to a vowel shift (which seems somewhat random) or the phonotactic familiarity of shn vs nsh—we can just say that the garbled Feshnaw sounded so similar to the preexisting surname Fanshawe, that people just conflated the two surnames in speech.

But not in writing. After all, the conflation in pronunciation did not entitle any Fanshawes to any Featherstonhaugh estates.

So the absurd pronunciation of Featherstonhaugh as /ˈfænʃɔː/ has a really simple explanation. They’re not actually trying to say Featherstonhaugh. They’ve switched it to a completely different, easier to pronounce surname, and they aren’t admitting it.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some human-made things you dislike or like that are present in South (and West) Cyprus?

Now, to my eyes, this statue of Makarios at the Archbishopric of Cyprus is a reasonable and respectful depiction of the Father of the Nation.

But my friend Vlado did not alight in the Cyprus of 1961. […] So he made merciless fun to me of Mecha-Makarios, trampling the streets of Nicosia and crushing all underneath.

Eutychius Kaimakkamis:

We can afford to be a little arrogant, not every country has a giant robotic religious leader at its disposal :^)

https://www.quora.com/What-are-s…

I actually laughed out loud!

… You know, this gets a cartoon.

Plinth:

Μακάριος Γʹ Αρχιεπ. Κύπρου
Makarios III Archbishop of Cyprus

Cypriot motorist (in dialect):

Ρε Μακαριώτατε! Έλα να δεις ίντα ’ν’ πὄκαμες!
Oy, Your Beatitude! Now look what you’ve done!

(Pun being, Beatitude is Makariotatos, the superlative of Makarios.)

First, as my friend Sam Murray puts it (God, I’m sounding like Michael Masiello now), it was ever thus, and only attitudes to cheating have changed, by both place and time.

Never mind the Ancient Greeks and Paris shtupping Helen (which was much more about Bronze Age views of host–guest relations than either Menelaus or Paris particularly caring what Helen thought). In Modern Greece, there’s a huge backlog of pop songs about “illicit love”. That ain’t jailbait or gay sex they’re talking about. That’s adultery.

Is adultery out of control in Greece? If so, was it any less out of control in the ’70s, when adultery was a crime, and illicit couples would be nabbed by the husband, and frogmarched to the police station, wrapped in a bedsheet?

Was it any less out of control in the 19th century, when they came up with the couplet:

Όταν θα μάθει ο κερατάς την τέχνη του κεράτου
μέλι και γάλα γίνεται με τη νοικοκυρά του
When a cuckold learns the art of being cuckolded,
he becomes all honey and sweetness with his lady.

Was it any less out of control in the Middle Ages, when one of the first vernacular Greek expressions explicated by the scholar Michael Psellos was keratas “horned man = cuckold”?

Cheating is part of the wiring of humanity. In the good old patriarchal days, a hell of a lot of social structures were set up to prevent it, because women were their fathers’ or husbands’ property. (Again, it’s not clear women had much of a say in any of it.)

(The notion dies hard. This year it came out that a sports show host in Australia was having sex with his co-host’s wife. The public was somewhat perplexed with the host’s grief, given that they’d already divorced. But hey, it’s well within the bounds of post-divorce trauma, go easy. Rather less sympathised with was how the host put it: “It’s just wrong, mate — you don’t touch a man’s wallet, you don’t touch his wife.” Billy, your wife is nothing like your wallet.)

There’s more opportunity for cheating now than in 1000 BC, and more visibility of it, because those social structures have indeed been worn down, and because the sexual revolution has happened. People are much more free to pursue what they want to do with sex, and can get away with much fewer biological consequences.

But you know what? We’ve done away with the leaden hand of legalised patriarchy, and obligate pregnancy, and globally enforced monogamy. But we haven’t done away with notions of commitment and moral reciprocity. In fact, they’re reinforced, if anything, because we now choose to work out what the right thing is to do, and we choose to stick with it.

One of the cool things about the poly folk here, like Franklin Veaux or Claire J. Vannette, is that they say, eloquently and vividly: I choose to be poly. You can choose to be mono. And if you commit to being mono, then I will respect your commitment—and I will call you out for breaking that commitment, and thereby hurting the person you’ve made a commitment to.

Not because they want to safeguard the community store of virtue. But because they genuinely get morality. Would that more people did.

You mean, other than yours, Habibi le toubibi?

And mine? (Nick Nicholas: loved him so much, they named him twice.)

Zeibura S. Kathau ranks highly. Quora Search, so I can’t find where he explained how he came up with it; but the Zeibura is his invention, and it’s arresting. I’m normally culturally reactionary enough to sneer at such things, but his moniker makes a lot of sense to me. It’s got Zzzing, and Burrrrrragadocio, and Mitteleuropa goodness all over it.

Admittedly, it makes more sense to me with him living in Czechia, than if he’d stayed in Britain. 🙂

This actually isn’t my own dislike, but it’s a dislike that really struck me.

My father left Cyprus in 1966. He was in tears the day that Archbishop Makarios III died. I’ve only been back to Cyprus twice, in 1979 and 1989, and briefly and superficially at that.

So I don’t have a clear notion of how Cyprus has evolved and changed, from a colonial backwater of popular revolt, to… well, to what it is now.

I was friends a decade ago with a Serbian postdoc. Before coming to Melbourne, he’d spent time at the University of Cyprus, in Nicosia.

Now, to my eyes, this statue of Makarios at the Archbishopric of Cyprus:

is a reasonable and respectful depiction of the Father of the Nation:

But my friend Vlado did not alight in the Cyprus of 1961. He alighted in the Cyprus of 2005, and he alighted from Serbia, a place where people are skeptical of religious leadership. (In fact they’re skeptical of religious leadership now in Cyprus, too.) And a place where people are even more skeptical about monumental depictions of national leaders.

So he made merciless fun to me of Mecha-Makarios, trampling the streets of Nicosia and crushing all underneath.

That really was a shock to me. But you know, his eyes are probably clearer in this than mine would be.

The edit logs gives you access to something their feed doesn’t: their comments.

If I like what someone has to say in their answers, I’ll follow them: I won’t go to check their comments, I’ll be seeing them live soon enough.

There are three circumstances in which I’ll check someone’s edit log.

• I haven’t heard from someone in a while, and I’m checking if they’re back yet. I’m doing that with someone now. Do come back, Person Whose Identity I’m Not Divulging.
• I’m bored, and I want an extra dose of someone’s Quora goodness.
• I suspect someone is being a troll or malcontent, and I want to make sure. Especially important if someone never answers and only comments. Also handy if the rest of what they say is sensible, so you don’t necessarily dismiss them completely.