Month: January 2017

Like the others said. There is a split between American accents and Commonwealth accents, with American often more archaic; the retention of r after vowels is the biggest shibboleth (and several British and Irish accents line up with America there). The Australian accent is pretty close to London English, though apparently there was a Midlands influence too.

What is halfway between British and American is not the accent in Australia, but the spelling, and increasingly the vocabulary. We spell jail not gaol, for example, and you will hear more and more US-specific words. As much as anything, that’s media and globalisation.

Thank you again, Habib le toubib, for a thought provoking question about my experience here. I don’t want to spend all my time answering Questions about Quora on Quora, but you really do get to the nub with these.

I was touched to see people close to me answering this, and having an experience pretty close to mine. Sam Murray, John Gragson, Michael Masiello, Clarissa Lohr, Kittie Eubank, Jordan Yates, Michael Koeberg, Habib Fanny, McKayla Kennedy, Heather Jedrus, Elke Weiss, Yonatan Gershon. It’s like one of those “I love youse all” cartoons I keep drawing (with some future members).

A lot of what I’ll say will overlap, but this is a survey question.

• Like the Magister said, I no longer differentiate my new followers; I’m sorry, there are already too many of them. I feel bad about that, but it is what it is.
• I have become extremely picky now about following new people. I want to keep it to a manageable size: I can’t keep it as low as the Right number determined through primate research (150, as Michaelis Maus has pointed out somewhere), but I am trying to get not too far above 300.
• Jordan commented somewhere that she spends a minute, when she gets followed by someone new, to see if they’re worth following back. I used to spend that amount of time, when I read that answer by her: read some answers, check their tenor. Not any more. It’s 5 seconds now: topics I care about? No? Next.
• If you keep upvoting me and commenting at me, I will notice you. But not at the outset. I’m sorry.
• The intimacy has gone, as others have noted too. I am interacting with a much broader range of people, and I’m happy to. But I miss the time when it was just three middle aged Hellenophiles against the world 🙂 .
• My post It feels hollower by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile was mostly about how disgusted I was at how Sierra Spaulding had been treated here. But I alluded to something else in it: the start of me becoming “popular”, and how it felt like selling out.

Quora has been even less the same for me this past month, as the two voices I have come to cherish the most here, Michael Masiello’s and Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s, have been stilled—Dimitra because she actually has stuff in real life to deal with, Michael because he was shut down, and so were his friends.

To be brutal, having my friends out of my feed has allowed me to connect with new voices; the feed is harsh like that. But it hasn’t felt the same for me. I mean no insult to those I’ve started following the past month; there’s a reason I have, and I look forward to getting to know them even better. But it feels hollower for me here.

• Many more A2As, and much less of a chance to go finding questions on my own. I prefer questions I find, as I pondered at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you feel differently about A2A questions, compared to questions you find on your own? And sometimes the A2A backlog depresses me. (I’m also not aggressive enough at culling it.)
• I haven’t accepted the pressure to be more careful about what I upvote: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are you more careful about what you upvote/comment on answers because your followers will see it in their feed? The issue has come up; it may have cost me a friend, and it’s under discussion with someone else in PM right now. I’ve made my call though.
• A hell of a lot more time spent on comments and PM, much less time spent on answers, and much less time spent on learning from others. I am starting to have notifications turned on for those closest to me, so I don’t miss their stuff. And there are days I don’t make it to the feed at all.

I can corroborate Kathleen Grace: if you don’t hear back on an appeal within two weeks, it has been rejected.

Of course, I disagree radically with her about whether non-response is constructive customer service, or whether a one-line “you have violated BNBR” really helps you work out what the hell just happened in your 6 para answer. But there you go.

I have had two Spam notices and two benburrs (h/t Gigi J Wolf) within a month in December, after 15 months with no action. The Spam notices were both appealed successfully. Interestingly, one of the Spam notices must have been mislabelled; I didn’t even remember what the comment was, and on seeing it it seems to have been… BNBR against a former prime minister. Or ISIS.

The two BNBR appeals (one of which I’ve posted about at The Insurgency) have been unanswered, so presumed rejected.

Poem #1

My favourite Esperanto sonnet—which actually dissolves the very form of the sonnet; see:

What is your favorite phrase or line from a poem not in English?

Mi, dezirante ĉerkon
(kapitulaci,
ekshipokrito laca,
ĉi ŝakan ŝercon),

pluportis mian serĉon
ĝis la palaco
de ĉi korpo kuraca,
en kies riĉon

mi kitelumas
pli pace miajn ostojn
ol feton lulas

la utero; kaj ekson
mian ĝi teksas
en naskon.

I, wishing for a coffin
(to quit,
a tired ex-hypocrite,
this joke of chess),

continued my search
until the palace
of this healing body,
in whose riches

I besmock
my bones more peacefully
than the womb lulls

the fetus; and it weaves
my expiration
into birth.

Vocaroo | Voice message

Poem #2

You want obscure? Here’s obscure.

Petrarchan sonnets, written in Cypriot Greek in the mid-16th century. ΟΙ ΡΙΜΕΣ ΤΗΣ ΑΓΑΠΗΣ: ΜΑΣΑΙΩΝΙΚΑ ΕΡΩΤΙΚΑ ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΚΥΠΡΟΥ – THE RIMES OF LOVE: EROTIC MEDIEVAL SONGS OF CYPRUS

I don’t pay much tribute to my father’s, Cypriot side of the family: I wasn’t brought up there, I wasn’t passed on much of it. Apart from a very slight Cypriot accent in my otherwise Cretan- and English-flavoured Greek. So, to my Cypriot peers here: please accept this, by means of apology.

Vocaroo | Voice message

11.

Κοιμώντα μού φανίστην να βιγλίσω
εκείνην απού πήρεν την καρδιάμ μου,
με θάρος να μου στρέψη την υγειάν μου
κ’ εγώ να ’λπίζω μέσα μου να ζήσω·

αμμέ, με δίχως περισσά ν’ αργήσω,
ξυπνώντα ποίκα στρέμμα στην κυράμ μου·
εδίπλασα ξανά την καματιάμ μου
και πάλε πεθυμώ να ξηψυχήσω.

Μμάτια μου, αφόν κοιμώντα μού διδείτε
το ’θελα να θωρούσετε αννοιμένα,
τον κόσμον πιον γι’ αγάπημ μου μεδ δήτε.

Μμάτια μου, αφόν βιγλάτε κοιμισμένα
κείνον που θέλω πάντα να θωρήτε,
μείνετε μέραν νύχταν καμμυμένα.

As I slept, I thought I saw
her who has taken my heart,
with the expectation that she would turn my health around
and the hope inside that I would yet live.

So without much delay,
I woke and turned around to find my lady;
I doubled then again my sorrow
and I wish to breathe my last once more.

My eyes, since you grant me as I sleep
what I wish you could see when you are open,
then for my sake look no more upon the world.

My eyes, since you see while sleeping
what I wish you could keep watching forever,
then stay shut, night and day.

Ah. Let us now praise famous Quorans, and the mentors that begat us.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZvHgp_bKmGo

(And remember to listen through to the last verse, folks.)

The following followers of mine have more than 20k followers of their own.

• Alon Amit (40.5k)
• Stephanie Vardavas (33.9k)
• Sabrina Deep (28.5k)
• Paul Denlinger (27.1k)
• Anita Sanz (26.2k)
• Claire J. Vannette (21.6k)

May I prove worthy of their follows. May I prove worthy of all my followers, whether their follower count is 50k or 0.

Natural justice – Wikipedia

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Has Quora started getting rid of profile biographies after banning users?

I don’t post much here any more; it’s hard for me to get worked up about the missteps and the fumbles and the capriciousness. Plus, I’m endeavouring to be constructive in my criticisms. I have, after all, as Ari Fleischer once said, been “noted in the building”.

But I don’t want to hear about no “ooh, we respect banned users’ privacy” or “ooh, we want this to be a constructive site”. This is a straight out deprivation of natural justice.

The profile, as anyone edit-blocked knows, is the only means you have left to communicate when you’re banhammered. The profile is where the banned get to leave their farewells to the community. A farewell they have often earned. A farewell their peers often are entitled to.

And this has now been stripped of them.

I am offended.

OK.

I may delete this answer, but to help out Ella González, I’d like to clarify what Tatiana’s post that Ella mentioned was all about. I do not think there is a direct relation between that and the blog being deleted.

Tatiana at Christmas time declared the annual truce on RAQ, inviting people to say what they liked about Quora. Tatiana added that she was concerned this past year, that people were starting to say they loathed Quora, or individual staff, or even her.

Tatiana’s more recent post was that she was concerned that a group of people, and one person in particular as the ringleader of that group, were not just criticising Quora in general, but making ad hominem attacks, @-mentioning and complaining against individual Quora staff. That was making it personal, she added, and those people were no longer welcome on the blog.

And she ended by saying that she was very worried that everyone else would take that to mean that they weren’t welcome on the blog either, and that this would mean noone would have the courage to post on the blog any more either.

I will not name any names, but I know who the purported ringleader is, and so does he. He does do what Tatiana says he does. He’d noticed some deletion activity around his RAQ posts days before, so he knew what was afoot. When the post was made, he commented to say that he acknowledged Tatiana’s request, and unsubscribed from the blog.

I also commented to the post, saying that I noted her point, and that I would never piss on the carpet in the blog that is Tatiana’s house.

I said that, because I have also said publicly that I am in sympathy with said ringleader. I do not choose to do what he does, but I do choose to be vocal about things I think are wrong, and to say I am not a fan of how Quora is managed.

Nothing in her post indicated that Tatiana was considering pulling the plug on the blog. And since the gripes kept coming in after it, nothing visibly corroborated her fear that her post had led to a chilling effect on the blog.

So whatever happened to RAQ, I believe that the post (by itself) wasn’t it.

The explanation behind this is tied up with the bizarre history of the Traditional English pronunciation of Latin. I didn’t find an explicit explanation of what happened with species, and in fact the rules in that Wikipedia page took me in a slightly different direction to where I hoped to go.

But here goes. I apologise for fauxnetics in the following.

There are two rules at play here.

1. -i-es (which would originally have been pronounces like –yeez) gets merged into –es (pronounces –eez). Aries is pronounced identically to Ares; rabies is pronounced identically to rabes. Originally, they would have been pronounced Air-yeez, rabe-yeez.
2. An i before another vowel was pronounced as a semivowel (y): e.g. –ies = –yeez above. The combination sy ended up pronounced as sh. Russia > “Rusha”. Nation: na-si-on > na-syon > na-shon. Special: spe-si-al > spe-syal > spe-shal.

Now. If Rule number 1 gets applied to species before Rule 2, you get:

• spē-si-ēs
• spē-syēs
• spē-sēs (Rule 1: -ies > -es)
• = spee-seez. There is no place for Rule 2 to get applied: there’s no sy any more in the word.

If Rule number 2 gets applied to species before Rule 1, you get;

• spē-si-ēs
• spē-syēs
• spē-shēs (Rule 2: -si-e- > -sy-e- > -sh-e- )
• = spee-sheez. There’s no place for Rule 1 to get applied: there’s no -i-es any more in the word.

So there’s a timing conflict: if both rules were happening at the same time, it’s a matter of which rule got there first. And both pronunciations survived, because some speakers (or rather, some schools) applied one rule first to species, and other speakers (schools) applied the other rule first.

This kind of conflict btw is routine in historical linguistics; we refer to feeding vs bleeding rules (where a rule gets preempted by another rule).

Now, to me, spee-seez is a more posh pronunciation than spee-sheez. I don’t see an explanation for that here. I see something related in the pronunciation of ratio as ray-shyoe rather than ray-shoe: the -y- was put back in to reflect the spelling, as a hypercorrection. But if anything, that would suspect that spee-syeez > spee-sheez was the academic pronunciation, which doesn’t sound right to me.

So yes, English pronunciation is random, particularly English pronunciation of Latin. But it’s not inexplicable.

I have asked some OPs. It isn’t just tattoos, but it is mostly emblematic use. Mottos, gifts, that kind of thing. It’s not homework, or some guys at the Vatican stuck translating an encyclical.

And that’s cool. I appreciate the interest, and when I do answer questions like that, I make a point of trying to make it sound good.

More ancient Greek would be nice, though.

Mehrdad is more of an expert about who Mehrdad is than I am: Mehrdad Dəmirçi’s answer to Who is Mehrdad Dəmirçi?

I can only answer with what I know:

• He is an Azeri Iranian.
• He is inquisitive.
• He has a subdued sense of humour.
• He asks me lots of A2As about Iranians, Azeris, Turks, and the context around them.
• I actually know very little about Iranians, Azeris, Turks, and the context around them, so I can’t often answer his A2As. But as a neighbour’s neighbour, I truly appreciate the questions, and sometimes I do try and give a well-thought out answer. (Even if they’re not always well-informed.)
• His surname (“Smith”) has the same etymology as that as the main fiddler of my home town, Γιάννης Δερμιτζάκης (“Dermidzo-yannis”: Yannis Dhermidzakis, Greek and Turkish for “John Smith”). So I feel I’ve already met him somewhere, and I expect him to be playing a Kemenche with sleighbells. (See: Cretan lyra)
• Oh, and he is a good looking man. I mean, seriously:

Lock up your daughters.