Day: May 25, 2017

Translation to Federation Standard follows:

yItamchoH jay’ ’ej HuchwIj yItlhap! nuqDaq jIqI’?

mach tlhIngan Hol mu’ghom, ’ej tlhIngan Hol Quora tu’lu’chugh, pIj DIvI’ Hol mu’mey lo’lu’ net pIH. jIHvaD qay’be’.

cha’ Seng vIpIHlaH:

• tlhIngan Hol Quora lo’laHwI’ law’ law’, wa’maH law’ puS; ’a wa’vatlh law’ law’. Quoravetlh leHmeH yapbe’.
• meqna’mo’ tlhIngan Hol Wikipedia bot Jimbo Wales. vuDvetlh jeS D’Angelo ’e’ vIHar. Dogh Quora DIvI’ ’e’ luQub Huch nobwI’, ’e’ Hajba’.

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Shut up and take my money! Where do I sign up?

The Klingon vocabulary is small, and if a Klingon Quora were used, people would often end up borrowing English vocabulary. That’s not a problem for me.

I anticipate two problems:

• There’s more than 10 people that could use a Klingon Quora, but less than 100. Not enough to maintain such a Quora.
• Jimbo Wales blocked Klingon Wikipedia for a clear reason. I’d think D’Angelo would be of the same mind. He’d clearly fear funders thinking Quora Inc is being silly.

It’s been thousands of years since the Greeks held Istanbul. The Byzantine Empire succeeded the Roman Empire, so it doesn’t count as Greek.

To its contemporaries at least before 1204, and maybe even afterwards, perhaps not. To objective historians sceptical of notions of ethnic continuity and romantic nationalism, perhaps not. To the people who claim Byzantium as part of their past, and who looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople as their leader throughout their time in the Rum Millet—of course it counts.

That, and everything I had to say about the subject in: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do modern Greek people feel that Istanbul/Constantinople belongs to them?

There is a reason that why and what are spelled with an <h>, and that’s it:

Pronunciation of English ⟨wh⟩ – Wikipedia

It is now most commonly pronounced /w/, the same as a plain initial ⟨w⟩, although some dialects, particularly those of Scotland, Ireland, and the Southern United States, retain the traditional pronunciation /hw/, generally realized as [ʍ], a voiceless “w” sound. The process by which the historical /hw/ has become /w/ in most modern varieties of English is called the wine–whine merger.

…

The merger is essentially complete in England, Wales, the West Indies, South Africa, Australia, and in the speech of young speakers in New Zealand. The merger is not found, however, in Scotland, nor in most of Ireland (although the distinction is usually lost in Belfast and some other urban areas of Northern Ireland), nor in the speech of older speakers in New Zealand.

Most speakers in the United States and Canada have the merger. According to Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006: 49), while there are regions of the U.S. (particularly in the Southeast) where speakers keeping the distinction are about as numerous as those having the merger, there are no regions where the preservation of the distinction is predominant (see map). Throughout the U.S. and Canada, about 83% of respondents in the survey had the merger completely, while about 17% preserved at least some trace of the distinction.

The merger seems to have been present in the south of England as early as the 13th century. It was unacceptable in educated speech, however, until the late 18th century. Nowadays there is not generally any stigma attached to either pronunciation. Some RP speakers may use /hw/ for ⟨wh⟩, a usage widely considered “correct, careful and beautiful”, but this is usually a conscious choice rather than a natural part of the speaker’s accent.

A portrayal of the regional retention of the distinct wh- sound is found in the speech of the character Frank Underwood, a South Carolina politician, in the American television series House of Cards. The show King of the Hill pokes fun at the issue through character Hank Hill’s use of the hypercorrected [hʍ] pronunciation. A similar gag can be found in several episodes of Family Guy, with Brian becoming annoyed by Stewie’s over-emphasis of the /hw/ sound in his pronunciation of “Cool hWhip” and “hWil hWheaton“.

I’ve been here long enough to be shocked by a number of departures, voluntary or forced.

• Jimmy Liu was my first, and the one that keeps haunting me.
• Pegah Esmaili affected me the most.
• Steven de Guzman
• Anya Reeve.
• Laura Hale
• Sophie Dockx
• Laura Hancock, just today.

Sappho, in both the original and translation, is in fact served very well online; Robert Todd and Michael Masiello have given the free links.

For subscription sites (which individuals can subscribe to, and universities will subscribe to), see Loeb Classical Library, which has the bilingual texts of the hardcopy, and my erstwhile employer the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, featuring my morphological analyses.

I was a child in Greece, 1979–1983, and maybe not the best informed source of information on attitudes toward the North at the time. I know that in socialist circles, the notion of “The Northern Threat” (ο εκ του Βορρά κίνδυνος) was often ridiculed—surely everyone knew the Turks were the real enemy, within NATO, and not anyone in the Warsaw Pact.

Tito’s vague plans for a Macedonian Federation in the Greek Civil War did not figure in the popular imagination. Any notion of an actual Northern Threat in popular culture, in my experience, focussed on Bulgaria, with which Greece had actual hostilities in the early and middle 20th century, not Yugoslavia. I was in Crete though; Dimitra Triantafyllidou may have had a more granular understanding, being closer to them.

There was little rhetoric of Brother Serbs and Fellow Orthodox at the time; but there was a clear sense that Yugoslavia was the least bad of the three northern neighbours, and that we didn’t mind Tito. Tito’s death in 1981 was certainly a big deal.

Question answered: How is telecommuting working for you?

The plural of anecdote is Quora answers.

Herewith mine.

I worked for 3 years physically in a job that many of you will have already worked out by now, and 14 more telecommuting. The only way I could bear to keep working on that job was by telecommuting, and through the low level of supervision and engagement with management that entailed. And in fact, it’s astonishing I stayed with the job as long as I did.

Which is one way of dealing with difficult bosses, I guess.

Telecommuting can work, but you need a boss with clarity on their goals, a high degree of autonomy, a high degree of trust, a way of giving visibility to your work product, and an effective way of coordinating with colleagues. Particularly if you’ve got severe timezone clashes, these are challenges; I spent a lot of time on chat with my most excellent and generous and helpful programming colleagues; and weekly phone catchups with management were essential, all dysfunctions considered. I’m doing bits of work on Upwork now, and getting the attention of your British or US or even Indian client when you’re on UTC+10 is very hard; it’s getting me to stay up later than I should need to.

There’s high convenience and flexibility; but they come at a cost of lack of clarity and focus. I’m very happy to telecommute as a second job; I’d have misgivings about telecommuting for a primary job.

Vote #1 Dave Aronson’s answer to How is telecommuting working for you?, who’s gone into all of this in much better detail.

Not much, I regret to say, but a couple of things.

Curtis Lindsay’s answer to Chopin’s prelude #4 in E minor is his most famous. Despite the straightforward melody, it overflows with emotion. What is the main emotion expressed in the piece and why was this emotion used? This came at the right time for me to contemplate giving Chopin a second chance. I even bought a CD of the 24 preludes and 4 ballades.

I only liked the slow ones. But thank you, Curtis!

The other one was conceding that gender dysphoria is nature as well as nurture: a pathway from https://www.quora.com/Seeing-tha… , through https://www.quora.com/Seeing-tha… , to Nick Nicholas’ answer to Is gender dysphoria a recent phenomenon?

You’ll see me in the aftermath of changing my mind in comments; I was heading that way anyway, but actually listening to people experiencing dysphoria (such as Lux Li) was really instructive for me.

Victoria Weaver’s Star Trek technocommunism hasn’t made a convert of me yet, but I’m giving it a more sympathetic hearing than I’d have expected of myself.

Dimitris Almyrantis has an often contrarian, and always instructive perspective on history. I don’t know if he’s changed my mind, quite, but he’s certainly shifted me out of my comfort zone.

Actual lesbians have answered this question, and now, despite my better judgement, so will I. Using the insightful comment of one of their number as a springboard:

Molly Juul: https://www.quora.com/Are-there-…

The “aesthetically finding women more beautiful”-phenomenon is 100% social. Women are sexualized sooo much in the media, and men are constantly being told that “women are the only ones who should care about beauty, men can never be beautiful”. At least, this is my theory.

You know Ancient Greece? Men was seen as the aesthetically more beautiful and perfect gender.

This. And it’s salutary to spell it out:

• Individuals find people of varied genders hot, through a nebulous interaction of their innateness, their socialisation, and social constructs.
• The dominant narrative of hotness in Western society is heteronormative and male–centred. That doesn’t mean it’s bad; I don’t feel it’s horrid of me to find, I dunno, Sophia Loren attractive, because I don’t feel it’s horrid of me to be cis het male. It is a perspective, that happens to be the dominant one, but is as true as any other.
• The notion that this dominant narrative is the universal narrative, though, is pernicious to anyone who isn’t its direct beneficiary. Gay men deserve their beefcake too (and they get it). Straight women deserve it too, and a lot of them are socialised not to seek it—because blokes are unlovely. If blokes are so unlovely, why boff us at all? That gets very unhealthy very quickly.
• And I know noone should cry for the poor cis het male, but being told all your life that only chicks are attractive, and that you can only be a consumer of beauty and not a producer? That’s not healthy for blokes either. As you can see in the questions asked in the Relationships topic here.
• As for lesbians… my reaction downstream from Molly, via Melinda Gwin, was to reject the question as implying “are there lesbians because girls are hot according to heteronormative contingent cultural norms of femininity that a lot of lesbians overtly reject?” The heels-wearing, unironically femme “lesbians” of straight porn doing endless kissy-face may match the criteria of “hot” underlying the question; but they do not correspond to the life experience and predilections of all actual lesbians.
• Or so I am told.

So yes and no. Lesbians are lesbians because girls are hot. But the girls a straight man finds hot are not necessarily the girls a lesbian finds hot. Guys are hot too, despite the pernicious standard narrative. And lesbians aren’t lesbians because of a straight man’s notion of female beauty. Or because women are somehow intrinsically and objectively more attractive than men.

Now normally, there would be some banter in comments between me and Melinda about the objective facthood of feminine pulchritude, and how her current, atypically male partner violates her better judgment. But you know what? He too is lovable, including physically lovable.