Who do Greeks feel closer to historically or culturally? Turks or Iranians?

The Turks are the Neighbours. The Iranians are… the Neighbours’ Neighbour. Greeks have not have much direct contact with Iranians since the Turks moved in between the Persians and the Byzantines. They are aware of Iranians, but not closely. For all that we had well over a millennium of cultural contact with the Persians, that ended a millennium ago.

In fact, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the cultural commonalities I’ve discovered with Iranians, both in my twenties when I had Iranian fellow linguistics students, and latterly on Quora. (The emphasis is on: surprise.)

What’s your favorite Bible verse?

Originally Answered:

What is your favorite verse of scripture in The Holy Bible and why?

For linguistic reasons, Mark 16:4, referring to the stone being rolled away from the tomb:

ἦν γὰρ μέγας σφόδρα.

For [the stone] was fiercely huge.

It’s easy to lose sight in translation of how colloquial Mark is.

For stylistic reasons, 1 John 1–3, an avalanche of relative clauses crashing into each other, and sometimes onto the reader:

Ὃ ἦν ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς, ὃ ἀκηκόαμεν, ὃ ἑωράκαμεν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν, ὃ ἐθεασάμεθα καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν, περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς— καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἐφανερώθη, καὶ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ μαρτυροῦμεν καὶ ἀπαγγέλλομεν ὑμῖν τὴν ζωὴν τὴν αἰώνιον ἥτις ἦν πρὸς τὸν πατέρα καὶ ἐφανερώθη ἡμῖν—ὃ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ ἀκηκόαμεν ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν, ἵνα καὶ ὑμεῖς κοινωνίαν ἔχητε μεθ’ ἡμῶν· καὶ ἡ κοινωνία δὲ ἡ ἡμετέρα μετὰ τοῦ πατρὸς καὶ μετὰ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.

What led to Ancient Greeks to create such a fascinating history and culture?

It’s a good question, and a question that has been posed and discussed by many before.

  • The history of Classical Greece is more interesting than that of other places, because it had more conflict and more players: it wasn’t a steady-state, stable empire. (That came later, with the successors of Alexander.) Of course, being more interesting does not correlate to being happier.
  • The history of Classical Greece has gathered more interest, because its historians were read more; its historians were read more, in turn, because its culture was so fascinating to its successors. There’s nothing intrinsically more interesting about the Peloponnesian War than any number of other conflicts in antiquity—except that the Peloponnesian War had its Thucydides.
  • A key reason Jared Diamond identified for the West gaining technological supremacy was that it was decentralised, featuring a lot of small states in competition with each other during the Renaissance. You can say the same about Classical Greece, and I’m sure people have: lots of small city-states, acting as different laboratories of government and culture and technology, promoting trade and cultural exchange because they were not self-sufficient, and competing with each other.
  • When we think Classical culture, we mainly think Athens. Athens prevailed for a small time (but a critical time) because it got its own informal empire going, it was open to immigrants (though it did not grant them full civic rights), it had confidence in its power, and its dramatists and philosophers had enough leisure to ask tough questions. Athens did not come out of nowhere though: it built on centuries of both its own political experiments and others’. And remember that much of the science of Classical Greece came from Ionia, which was much more comfortable with the Persians.
  • As I’ve said elsewhere, a major reason why the West finds Ancient Greek culture fascinating is that it traces its intellectual heritage back to Greece. It does so, because Rome does so. Rome did so, partly because of its direct contact with the Greek colonies in Italy, but also, and likely more so, because of its contact with the Greek Empires of Alexander’s successors, the Seleucids and Ptolemies and whoever it was that was running Greece. Politically, these empires were nothing to do with Athens and Sparta; but Athens and Sparta and Ionia is where they drew their culture from.

Is Quora encouraging a culture of reporting on one’s colleagues?

Obviously the OP was looking for the word peer.

Quora expects members to report infractions against Quora’s policies, since they cannot detect all the infractions themselves. So yes to the letter of OP’s question.

The spirit of OP’s question, of course, by using the term “colleague”, is: should not group allegiance count against reporting to Quora? I have group allegiance to fellow Quorans who I see making good contributions, and there is a hell of a lot that Quora expects we report on, which I regard as at best chickenshit, and at worst specious. So yes, I empathise with what I suspect OP’s premise is.

That aside, I agree with Maura Rudd: see Maura Rudd’s answer to Is Quora encouraging a culture of reporting on one’s colleagues? If someone violates community norms egregiously, e.g. by issuing death or rape threats, by being insulting, or by spamming, then they are no peers of mine, and I am happy to dob them in.

(There are one or two respondents on this thread that I do not regard as peers, also, for their sneering attitude towards Quora as a community. )

I am also happy to make my own decision as to what counts as an infraction worth reporting. It’s not like Quora is paying me to enforce their standards.

In Early Modern English the pronunciation of “housewifery” was /’ʔɤzɪfɹəi/. What caused the apparent (partial) reversal in modern pronunciation?

Why did housewifery used to be pronounced uzzifrie, and now it’s pronounced house-wife-ree?

Well, let’s look at housewife itself. I’m looking up OED.

OED reports that the usual pronunciation in the second half of the 18th century of housewife, as given in pronunciation dictionaries, was /ˈhʌzwɪf/, huzzwiff, with its start matching hus-band (which has the same prefix). Often the w dropped off as well; cf. Warwick, Greenwich (hence huzzif); and the initial h would have dropped off in some dialects (hence uzzif, and uzzifry).

housewife started being pronounced like it is spelled, with an initial house, a bit later. hussy is a development of housewife (> hussif > hussy), and scholars suspect housewife changed to its modern pronunciation to differentiate it from hussy:

This diphthongal pronunciation became more common in sense 1 in the 19th cent. (it is either the preferred or the sole pronunciation in this sense in most late 19th-cent. pronouncing dictionaries), and is entirely predominant from the early 20th cent. onwards. While N.E.D. (1899) records the pronunciations (hɒ·zwif) /ˈhʌzwɪf/ and (hɒ·zif) /ˈhʌzɪf/ as frequent in sense 1 (and also records for the plural (hɒ·z(w)ivz) /ˈhʌzwɪvz/, /ˈhʌzɪvz/); D. Jones Eng. Pronouncing Dict. records /ˈhʌzɪf/ as ‘rare’ in this sense in 1917, and for the last time (as ‘old-fashioned’) in 1947; Webster (1934, 1961) gives it as still occasionally used in sense 1.

So the old pronunciation huzzif died out as late as the 1940s, though it was already marginal by 1860. housewifery would have followed the pronunciation of housewife.

Answered 2017-02-26 · Upvoted by

Heather Jedrus and

Logan R. Kearsley, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy.

Does Quora have “survival plans” in place, in case its main staff is wiped out?

Uninformed speculation here in, and enthusiastic agreement with Jake Mannix (Vote #1: Jake Mannix’s answer to Does Quora have “survival plans” in place, in case its main staff is wiped out?)

Does Quora have contingency plans in place of hardware failure of disks? Yes, inasmuch as Amazon cloud servers do; if Amazon does not have backup and contingency plans in case of hardware failure, a whole lot of enterprises are screwed.

Does Quora have contingency plans in case of a massive natural disaster in Silicon Valley? The prudent thing for them to do is to have them, but with users not paying for the privilege, and with Quora not yet monetised, there would have been less incentive to do so—that kind of contingency costs money, after all.

Over and above what Jake says—which should be seared into every user’s brain here: recall that Quora does not allow the site to be spidered by archive.org, for fear of people not being able to delete their posts clear off the internet. So if Quora goes belly up, as many an unmonetised Silicon Valley startup has done, no, there is no contingency plan for the community.

As I say whensoever this issue comes up: read Brian Bi’s answer to When, and how, will I be able to download all of the Quora content I have produced, like the Facebook and Twitter feed export options?. And if you can’t run Python scripts yourself, find someone who can on your behalf.