Month: January 2017

There are some users who can (or could) collapse any answer they find, since they are authorised to use Trusted Reporting (Quora feature):

• How do you tell if you are a trusted reporter?
• Who are the Trusted Reporters on Quora?

If you are not a trusted reporter, but you have an adequately high PeopleRank, you may still be able to collapse an answer.

The answers at Is it possible for a Quora user to have such a high PeopleRank that their downvote will collapse an answer by a normal user? say that it needs two downvotes. But those answers are from 2011.

Of course, if you keep downvoting answers that someone has already downvoted, and two downvotes are still needed, then you will see immediate collapses. But we don’t know how many downvotes an answer has already accumulated. I have only seen my downvotes collapse an answer intermittently.

This is the theory. Has the collapsing algorithm changed recently? I don’t know, and I don’t know how any one user would confirm it. But given the answers already here, I thought I should provide the status quo ante information here, at least.

It’s loh-vlih. It’s the redeeming grace of Mel B. It’s the comforting rolling accent of Sean Bean. It’s the accent of colleagues I’ve had from Sheffield and Hull, which I’ve had a lot of time for, even without their awesome accents.

And of course, 2:08 of:

Well, let’s generalise the question (though I don’t know Urdu well enough). This is not going to be a complete answer btw, and I’ll ask for help from others.

What is the difference between a preposition and a prefix, or a postposition and a suffix? That one is a word, and the second is part of a word. But how do you tell whether something is a word or not?

People assume that it’s obvious how, from written language. But that’s a convention. If your language is not written down, people will often get much more confused. I’ve seen that even with Tsakonian: people know how written Greek works fine, but they have difficulty extending those rules to such a deviant variant of Greek.

If a word has its own independent accent, then it’s not really different. In áfter áll, we can tell that after has its own accent.

But if the word is a clitic, an unaccented word, it’s much more difficult. There is a shade of grey between a clitic and an affix. How different do for every and forever sound? Often though, you can still put a word between the clitic and the host (main word), and that demonstrates that the clitic is still a separate word. For everybody > for almost everybody.

So there are syntactic and phonological tests you can apply, to determine whether something is truly an affix or a clitic, a case-ending or a postposition. But it can get subtle.

I am not across Urdu enough to say anything more, but this should keep you going until I find someone who does, Khateeb!

Yup.

Aeolism: Latin as a Dialect of Greek/Aeolism: Latin as a Dialect of Greek is a paper on that. And Are there any accounts of the Romans realizing linguistic similarity between Latin and Germanic languages? • /r/AskHistorians is a Reddit thread of it.

The locus classicus is Dionysius of Halicarnassus, but the idea was doing the rounds:

LacusCurtius • Dionysius’ Roman Antiquities

The language spoken by the Romans is neither utterly barbarous nor absolutely Greek, but a mixture, as it were, of both, the greater part of which is Aeolic; and the only disadvantage they have experienced from their intermingling with these various nations is that they do not pronounce all their sounds properly.

Vote #1 Amy Dakin: Amy Dakin’s answer to Ancient Greek transliteration: why does the letter κ become c, and the letter υ become y?

Bear in mind that K was imported into Latin from Greek, but it was a something of an affectation. It was never used seriously, so it was never going to be used in the latinization of Greek.

The reason Upsilon was imported into Latin from Greek was that Upsilon by then really did have a distinct sound from I and U. In fact we know that Upsilon was pronounced as ü in Greek right up until the 11th century.

Vote #1 Amy Dakin.

The reasons for the striking irregularities of the copula verb in Indo-European are addressed in Did the present indicative forms of the Latin verb “esse” evolve from two different roots? As those answers show, the Proto-Indo-European verb was in fact almost regular.

But there is a broader question of why the copula in particular is persistently irregular cross-linguistically. That has to do with the fact that it is the most frequent and the least contentful verb in a language.

Because it is underspecified, it attracts more suppletion, such as can be seen in the merger of be and was in English. Because it is so frequent, it is subject to much more phonological pressure towards ease of pronunciation and erosion. And because it has such a core function, language learners use it as a fixed set of given words, seared into their brains, and they resist any effort within the system to regularise it. That is why irregularities persist only in very frequent nouns and verbs.

Greece

When we Greeks were building Parthenons, you barbarians were still eating acorns. (Repeat ad lib)

Nick Nicholas’ answer to If your country had a slogan what it would be?

EU’s Response To Greece

… Yeah yeah yeah. You can have 10 gajillion more acorns, if you fire 100 bazillion more chipmunks…

I have already posted Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does your Greek handwriting look like?

There was a time long ago when I could write legibly. No longer.

In tribute to Ollie Bendon, via A spelling reform proposal I was rather fond of by Zeibura S. Kathau on Csak lét, I wrote a quick and then a half-heartedly neatish version.

And, much worse, these are some notes I took at work today.

My nib on my pen is playing up, but that really isn’t going to cut it as an excuse, is it…

Vote #1 Danya Rose, who as far as I know has the right answer.

Danya Rose’s answer to What does “copped a serve” mean and what is the origin of the expression?

To my astonishment, OED does not have the phrase. It does have related phrases under cop, v. 3: “to capture, catch, lay hold of”:

• to cop it “to be punished, to get into trouble”
• to cop a packet [no definition]
• to cop a plea “to plead guilty, usually as part of a bargain or agreement with the prosecution”
• to cop a feel “to fondle someone in a sexual manner”

However, under serve, n. 2 we do find the almost identical phase to give (someone) a serve: “to deal roughly wit; to criticize or reprimand sharply”, described as Australian slang. The noun is derived from to serve, and there are three definitions given: “service, adoration” (Middle English); tennis service; and “a serving or helping of food” (“3 serves of the bacon”).

I don’t know enough about tennis to know why cop a serve wouldn’t be referencing tennis. OED does strongly suggest that’s the only way to interpret it..

There was a bit of merriment when George W Bush used the word.

I actually don’t know whether Greeks in Greece know about the oddity of “Grecian”. My take, as someone bicultural: it’s not offensive, it’s just archaic; so seeing it in live use is puzzling. Because it’s archaic, I’m led to wonder whether I’m being exoticised into a box with Mine Ancient Ancestors and Urns—or whether the speaker just plain doesn’t know that it’s archaic English, which is why W was mocked for it.

There are, of course, contexts where Grecian is entirely appropriate to use. Such as my parody of Henry Higgins, in what at least one of my friends here has termed my best answer ever:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is it called when you get aroused by watching people die?