Why was the CEO of the Quora Hotline, Johanna Swan, banned?

In advance of this question being deleted, thanks to the diligence of other Quora users 😐

  • Don’t know
  • Can’t mention her on Necrologue, because she has < 100 followers.
  • Can’t see her profile to see what reason was given, because it’s unclickable as Quora User, under the subscribers to the Quora Hotline topic.
  • Because her name is changed to Quora User, a name change is somehow involved. This may merely be an edit block, and a request for her to change her name by Moderation, under suspicion of it not being a real name, rather than a ban.

EDIT: She’s back, as Jessica Wiggins: What’s With the Name Change??? by Jessica Wiggins on Jo’s Place

cc William Andersson

Which languages use a bare dental click for a plain no? Did this originate from a single language and spread to others?

Dental clicks – Wikipedia

Dental clicks may also be used para-linguistically. For example, English speakers use a plain dental click, usually written tsk or tut (and often reduplicated tsk-tsk or tut-tut; these spellings often lead to spelling pronunciations /tÉȘsk/ or /tʌt/), as an interjection to express commiseration, disapproval, irritation, or to call a small animal. German (ts or tss), Hungarian (cöccögĂ©s), Portuguese (tsc), Russian (ts-ts-ts; sound file) Spanish (ts) and French (tut-tut) speakers use the dental click in exactly the same way as English.

The dental click is also used para-linguistically by Middle Eastern languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Pashto, and Persian where it is transcribed as ‘نچ’/’noch’ and is also used as a negative response to a “yes or no” question (including Dari and Tajiki). It is also used in some languages spoken in regions closer to, or in, Europe, such as Turkish, Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian or Serbian to denote a negative response to a “yes or no” question. The dental click is sometimes accompanied by an upward motion of the head.

So Ali, you are onto something: there is one continuum of languages using it for “no”—and another continuum of language in which it conveys disapproval. Spanish and Portuguese, it seems, are common to both.

Turkish is in the middle of the first, and the first is Southern European and Middle Eastern and Central Asian, Spain through to Xinjiang (Wong Yoon Foong’s answer). Turkish could have been one vector of this, but with the feature also turning up in the Western Mediterranean, it can’t be the only vector. Greek or Latin could have been one vector of this, but again, with the feature also turning up in Central Asia, it can’t be the only vector. There’s likelier to have been multiple waves of this feature diffusing.

The feature could be innate and pre-linguistic; but I don’t get the impression that it is: it doesn’t seem to be attested in Africa or the New World.

The feature could be a Nostratic innovation (yes, I went there!), inherited into all of Indo-European, Semitic, and Turkic—diverging in Northern Europe into disapproval rather than negation. But that’s suspect as well, and areal diffusion is likelier.

And paralinguistic features (like grunts) and gestures do diffuse culturally. The head-toss for “no”, mentioned at the end of the Wikipedia quote, is a famous instance of this, turning up in Greece, Bulgaria, and Greek-influenced Southern Italy

Answered 2017-07-12 · Upvoted by

Steve Rapaport, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.

Where can I find the first 30 chapters of Thucydides?

For the Greek text, see:

What is the Greek population in Melbourne?

The census data for 2016 has been released as of 27 June 2017, and is available in breakdowns from Census DataPacks. And the Australian Bureau of Statistics loves their Microsoft Excel.

It isn’t immediately obvious from the zip file what’s going on, but with perseverance, it turns out that 162,103 people from the Greater Melbourne Area claim Greek ancestry, and 36,758 of them have both parents born in Australia.

What are your favourite pieces by Dimitri Shostakovich and why?

Impressed by Jeremy Shatan’s answer, to have included the Fourth Symphony! So Mahler, so anxious, so my favourite, and not often heard. The Cello Concerto #1 speaks well to Jeremy’s taste as well, but that piece is better known.

So, skipping those two:

  • Ninth Symphony. Jolly, quirky, Haydn on steroids, alternating with genuine lamentation in the 2nd and 4th movements. (Bernstein thought the 4th movement was a parody of Beethoven’s 9th; I’m not seeng it.)
  • 24 Preludes and Fugues. It may not be more formally perfect than Bach’s, but it has a much more prodigious emotional range, from the sunshine arpeggios of #7 to the tears of #24 to the insanity of #15.
  • String Quartet #8. A lot of extramusical lore has built up around this “suicide note”, and not unreasonably, with Shostakovich quoting himself repeatedly; but the music supports it. Harrowing.
  • Seventh Symphony. Not so much for the famous first movement, as for the solemn mass of the third, grieving and angry and soulful.
  • The Anti-Formalist Rayok is not a favourite piece, not even a particularly great piece, but its passive-agressive sniping at Stalin and Zhdanov is certainly instructive about where Shostakovich was at in 1948. Bonus for the YouTube performance featuring Stalin sung by a guy with a Stalin moustache and a Stalin pipe.

Is it possible to find all questions asked today on Quora?

In theory you can, using URLs like https://www.quora.com/log/revisi… , the log revision under which this question was created: download a numeric sequence of those URLs, extract the dates, and then extract the instances containing “Question added by
”


 In theory. In practice, that will get you banned, because Quora bans scraping of the site, and has squashed any attempts at an API for the site.

If you can’t find a way to do it through the Quora UI, it can’t be done. Sorry.

Are there any books that are written in Ancient Greek?