Month: January 2017

Let’s take the Greek State as 1832, when it had fixed boundaries.

I’m also going to use the pre-2010 Prefectures of Greece to break down the area of the new State.

We know that Arvanitika was spoken widely in the new Greek state. We know that many who fought in the War of Independence were monolingual Albanian speakers, who could not understand the instructions of Greek commanders.

15 of the 2010 prefectures were part of the new State. Of these:

• Arvanitika was the most widely spoken in Attica, Boeotia, Corinthia, and the Argolid, and the southern half of Euboea.
• As far as I know, it was all of Boeotia, most of Attica (Greek was limited to Athens, Aegina and Megara), most of Corinthia, and the eastern half of the Argolid.
• Arvanitika was a minority language in Messenia, Achaea, Arcadia, Laconia, and the Cyclades. Per Arvanitika – Wikipedia, not Elis.
• That leaves, by my guess, just 5 prefectures out of 15 where Arvanitika was not spoken: Phthiotis, Phocis, Eurytania, Aetolia & Acarnania, Elis.

Arvanitika and Greek were the major languages of the new State. I’m not aware of any Ladino: Jews in southern Greece spoke Greek. Not aware of any Slavonic spoken there since the Middle Ages. There would have been some Romany and Turkish spoken. There is a pocket of Aromanian spoken in Acarnania, per Aromanian language – Wikipedia.

I don’t have population numbers handy, and I don’t know if anyone does. Going by geography, Arvanitika was not the majority language, but it could easily have been spoken by a quarter of the population.

Well, there’s all the guesses on How can I become a Top Writer on Quora?, and the little hints dropped by Quora Inc, such as in Announcing Top Writers 2017 by Jonathan Brill on The Quora Blog:

As always, selection criteria include: the number, quality, and popularity of contributions, and moderation history.

So, the main criterion applied is being a good member of the community. Although yes, lots of head scratching about the relative weighting of these factors, and opacity that doesn’t do anyone any favours.

That isn’t the only criterion applied though. Two other criteria that have been applied are:

• Being an employee of Quora, regardless of the number, quality, and popularity of contributions (compared to other users). There has been discussion about this in the past (see Why have so many Quora employees awarded themselves Top Writer status?) This has been done presumably for reasons of dogfooding.
• Being a wellknown person outside of Quora, and not really much of a contributor to the community at all. For example, I give you the latest first-time Top Writer for 2017: Hillary Clinton.

I wonder if she’ll be wearing her Top Writer wind-cheater to any events…

The Wiki Editing Bug (Not the right moment for a bug! by Kat Rectenwald on Rage against Quora) has now hit this Answer Wiki too: entries are starting to disappear.

I will be updating my answer until the bug settles. Updating also from All the Top Writers for 2016 have been declared, but some of our favourites, unfortunately, didn’t make the list. Who are your favourites who didn’t make the list, and should be a new Top Writer in 2017?

EDIT: The bug seems to have gone away, so I’m no longer updating this answer.

—-

2017 First Time Top Writers (listed alphabetically by first name):

• Aaron Yip
• Aditya Kulkarni
• Amanda Harris
• Andrea Livo
• Andrew Weill
• Appu Pandey
• Asher Nitin
• Athena Walker
• Aviral Bhatnagar
• Audrey Ackerman
• Awdhesh Singh
• Barbara Robson
• Ben Waggoner
• Carolyn Dalton
• Cecili Chadwick
• Cody Shirk
• Connie Hammis
• Cristian Montes de Oca
• Dale Thomas
• Dana Sun
• Dave Buchfuhrer
• Dimitra Triantafyllidou
• Glenn Luk
• Heather Jedrus
• Jacob Minz
• Jade Kandel
• Jennifer Edeburn
• Joe Buettner
• Josephine Stefani
• Joshua Pan
• Kala Veon
• Katya Kirichenko
• Kaushal Sinha
• Kim Aaron
• Kittie Eubank
• Larry Dixon
• Katakam Manas Teja
• Mariana Ferreira Albuquerque
• Melissa Myer
• Menique Aviles
• Mercedes R. Lackey
• Michelle Hozey
• Michelle Toich
• Mohan Vanamalai
• Neil Menon
• User
• Orlando Barrios
• Pedro Miranda
• Prasanna Sivakumar (பிரசன்னா சிவகுமார்)
• Rebecca Baldwin
• Robin Thomas
• Roman Trusov
• Ryan Borker
• Sable de Oliveira
• Sierra Spaulding
• Stefan Pociask
• Tyagarajan Sundaresan
• Vadim Berman
• William Murphy
• Yash Geryani

Hey Philip Newton! Hi Chrys Jordan! Over here, Vicky Prest!

20.

Fred Landis, a psychologist cannot choose his siblings! (Simon Baron Cohen, who came up with the test.)

The most badass thing about McKayla is that she would never A2A a question about herself being badass.

… Oh.

But seriously.

I don’t know her as well as I make it seem. I certainly don’t see enough of her in my feed. So I may have completely misconstrued her in this.

But what I find the most badass about McKayla is what I see as her essential decency. I hope that does not come across as weak. Because it isn’t.

It is the kind of decency you don’t see enough of. A decency that is prepared to interrogate itself. A decency that would put kindness above dogma, yet that does not compromise its essence. A decency that is earnest and giving, yet still knows how to shield itself. A decency present whether clad in tears or joy.

Like I say. I don’t know McKayla that well.

But that’s what I think is the most badass thing about her.

That, and the McDoodles…

According to “The History of Fellatio”, there’s depictions of fellatio associated with the myth of Isis reviving Osiris. Ancient Egypt is a safe guess, and that seems to be a corroboration.

I’ll answer this for Greek.

Irregular verbs are really irregular, to the extent of suppletion between different persons, and all sorts of other shenanigans.

Thematic and athematic are two different classes of regular verb. The athematic class is smaller, and has more core vocabulary verbs, so we presume it to be older; it’s like the strong/weak verb distinction in Germanic.

The thematic vowel is a vowel that connects personal inflections to the tense stem of a verb in Greek. It’s alternates between an e or an o. So, to take the paradigm verb lyō:

ly-o-ɔː > lyɔː
ly-e-es > lyeːs λύεις
ly-e-e > lyeː λύει
ly-o-men
ly-e-te
ly-o-ōsi > lyoːsi λύουσι

Athematic verbs have a different set of inflections, with no initial vowels, and no connecting vowel. So tithɛːmi ‘I put’:

tithe-mi > tithɛːmi τίθημι
tithe-s > tithɛːs τίθης
tithe-si > tithɛːsi τίθησι
tithe-men
tithe-te
tithe-aːsi

I’m not googling Slavic, sorry. 🙂 But it’d be the same thing: historical linguists have worked out that the connecting, thematic vowel is present in the thematic verbs, and absent in the athematic vowels. They are still both regular in their own way, compared to the truly irregular verbs.

It’s a cute question. There are aesthetics to scripts. There has been a lot of aesthetic effort put in to the calligraphies and typographies of a lot of scripts.

In fact, when I was perusing Omniglot, to find something that jumped out as ugly, I realised that the obvious candidates were minority—one-off scripts of small communities, that never got the professional attention lavished on them that big-league scripts have had.

So Eskayan script, for example (Eskayan script and language) should not be targeted here. And having found an article about it: it doesn’t look anywhere near as ugly in notebooks in situ, as it does on the sample charts online.

The major Unicode script I happen to like least is Thaana (Thaana (Maldivian) script). But the reason for that, I think, is an Uncanny valley effect: it looks like it should be Arabic, but it isn’t. (In fact, it originated as a mix of Arabic and Indic numbers.)

Me?

Scottish. Och. I dinna ken why.

Why no, actually, I have not told my Personal Trainer from Edinburgh this.

Nor her equally Scottish wife, for that matter.

The evidence reported in Quora deleted a private message I was writing as “unsafe” because it contained the word “stupid”. How do I get it back? suggests that it does.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise… but yes. It does.