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Albanian and Greek are related, though not as closely related as their geographic proximity would suggest. So it could be a common inheritance, or it could be a loan.

*Goes to his copy of Vladimir Orel’s Albanian Etymological Dictionary*

*Finds that the page where thrime would appear has been misscanned*

*Bugger*

On that basis, I can’t answer the question with an informed opinion.

My uninformed opinion is that, if the word in two languages looks pretty similar, the default assumption is that it’s an old borrowing, not a native cognate (related word). If it was a common inheritance from Indo-European, you would expect it to diverge more.

Jimmy Liu for me too, Habib le toubib, and Jimmy Liu for a lot of us. Proof positive that gadflies don’t survive long here.

Dimitris Almyrantis was reminiscing about a banned user, and I asked him: “So, [whoever it was] was your Jimmy Liu, then.” He retorted “No, Jimmy Liu was my Jimmy Liu.”

Aw, come on. No Canberra hate from you people? That’s positively UNAUSTRALIAN!

I admire the methodicality of Ben Reimers in his answer. In fact, do look at it: Ben Reimers’ answer to Is Canberra the worst city in Australia?

The emotive definition of a good city to live in, that OP is presumably after, is not intrinsically about access to a beach. Or at least, I don’t think it is, being not much of a beach-goer. (That’s un-Australian too.) But it is critical mass of population, to sustain a vibrant cultural, entertainment, and gastronomical life; good amenities; and nice landscape.

To some, it needs to be “a good place to raise a family”. Mila Karmacharya has said it, just as many say it about Perth.

That criterion is not necessarily antithetical to “critical mass of population, to sustain a vibrant cultural, entertainment, and gastronomical life”. But, well, if it is, that decides me on it. And decides everyone whole who lives in Sydney or Melbourne on it too.

The way out is to say that Canberra is too small to be a city to begin with. It certainly feels that way. Especially if you’re trying to get a cab in the afternoon, to get to the airport to escape Canberra.

It is true that the restaurant scene has improved radically in the last decade. There are even honest-to-God bars in Canberra now. (I hesitate to say pubs.) And I did see a homeless mission wondering about the CBD at night; so it’s not as Stepford as I’d thought it is.

But of the capitals of states and territories, it is certainly the sleepiest. And that weighs heavily on anyone who lives in Sydney or Melbourne.

As Pieter van der Wilt said in comments:

Well nothing really very outstanding. The great achievements of mankind during the last 200 years come mainly from highly industrialized nations (UK, France, Germany, USA, etc…). Greece is a small country with a fairly high level of creativity.

All nations are great, because humanity is great. The literature and music of Modern Greece have unparalleled depth and diversity and lyricism, and are a gift to the world. (Though that is just as true of the literature and music of Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, and Bolivia, and Vanuatu.)

As Pieter said in his answer, Byzantium preserved ancient Greek scholarship—but didn’t build on it: that was left for the Western Renaissance. I could add Orthodox Christianity; but as theology rather than ritual, all the work had been done by 800 AD anyway.

If you’re after technological achievements, well, there are individual Greeks who have done things; overwhelmingly and inevitably, they’ve done things in the UK and the US.

We’ve made much more of a recent impact on our immediate region of the Balkans, as anyone in the region will tell you. But you spoke of the world, not of our neighbourhood.

From your comments to Pieter, OP, it looks like you’re reaching at a comparison with the Muslim world. But the game now in advances for humanity is a globalised game. The Ummah doesn’t get its own Golden Age any more; we’re much too interlinked for that. The Ummah gets to contribute to the advances for humanity, by taking part in the research and the stewardship spearheaded (for now) by the West. The West will likely yield its mantle within our lifetimes to China. The part of the Ummah that has relied on oil will have to work out what to do once oil no longer matters—and how to work with the West and China on the cleanup.

And I should hope that over a billion Muslims don’t need to draw lessons by comparison with a small bankrupt country of 10 million.

More of the same. We have Haldeman’s notes of his meeting with Nixon, and we have forensic proof that we aren’t missing any of his notes for the day. Nixon was clearly starting to talk about coverup, but would not yet have elaborated the whole CIA National Security lie.

Nixon didn’t wipe the tape because it was more incriminating than the Smoking Gun tape. He wiped it because it was the first tape he got hold of, and he was defeated by the challenge of wiping them, as a long-standing klutz.

I just got it for 10 posts in half an hour.

Per https://www.quora.com/Who-has-th… , looks like it blocks for 2–3 days. Was blocked for4.5 days now; appealed through bug report (and thanks to Tatiana Estévez for investigating).

In my instance, the block applied to all posts I owned, and was deemed a bug. If you get this, a bug report is the way to go; but stop short anyway of 10 posts per… I dunno, hour? day?

I was going to write my own question:

What kind of music makes you want to do a Snoopy Dance?

The answer for me is Dixieland Jazz. Don’t even care what the song is; the Dionysian untrammelled polyphonic joy of it just makes me want to stick my snout in the air, spread my arms, and bob my head from side to side.

Did so in the car yesterday, in fact.

Utterly random instance. I DEFY you to resist doing your own Snoopy Dance.

As Jakobson once said, though artlessly,
poetry claims th’ axis of combination.
The repertoire of sounds, in crafty array,
are how the Muse stakes her signification.
Without form woven in sonority,
poetry loses its essential claim:
ends up as prose with gilded metaphor,
but does not merit the enchanter’s name.

The Homeoteleuton as a device
was known to Greeks as such a mechanism,
who had recourse to it; but other means
drew their attention more— like metered rhythm.
The Irish used it too; but it would seem
that rhyme emerged from out of Andalus
into the veins of European verse,
as its main anchor through form-moulding use.

Some now deem it passé, but let them look
to craft sound still. Else, they can shove their book.

Andrew Baird has blocked me, so I’ll post here my corrective that the Parthenon blew up because the Venetians bombarded it. Yes, the Ottomans stored their gunpowder there. They figured the Franks would never destroy the old stones they venerated. And there was noone in the Ottoman realm with the concerted evil of Michel Fourmont: the Ottomans, like their Greek subjects, did benign neglect of antiquities, not systematic destruction. They were not Wahhabis.

In fact, his picture of the Parthenon is an excellent illustration of what’s happened to the Ottoman presence in Greece for a different reason, and not even metaphorical. The Acropolis remained in use as the Athens citadel for millennia. There were any number of Byzantine, and Frankish, and Ottoman structures on the Sacred Rock. They were extirpated from the site in the 1830s, in the service of the single narrative of Hellenic Antiquity.

And a lot of the physical remains of Ottoman Greece were dispensed with in the same way. Particularly in Athens, and in Thessalonica only somewhat less so. (Not to mention turning the Hamza Bey Mosque there into the Alkazar porn cinema.)

So you have to look around to find minarets, and they’re something of a surprise when you do find them.

Vote #1 Alistair Smith: He’s got the most important stuff. Alistair Smith’s answer to What are the top 10 things everyone should know about Melbournians?

We are coffee snobs, we (well not me) are sports mad. We dress in black, and we wear layers because of the volatility of the weather. We (and I guess South Australia) are more lefty than the rest of the country; right wing shock jocks are much more a Sydney thing.

Alistair did #1–#6. I’ll add these as #7–10:

• We dislike Sydney. This is a fairly commonplace kind of city rivalry, and takes the form of sneering at their lack of culture (yes, they have the Opera House, we try to forget that). The worst thing we could say about the generic sitcom Hey Dad..! was “What do you expect of a comedy filmed in Sydney”. TV stations will try to keep the Sydney origins of most Australian TV shows quiet here.
• We have geographical divides. There is an impoverished West and an affluent East. There is a North of the River/South of the River split. People living in hipster Brunswick (such as, oh, everyone I knew at Melbourne Uni) would never venture any further south than St Kilda. Which is not very far south.
• There is an old stuffy class-conscious elite in Melbourne, though you really have to dig deep to find it. My one experience of it was being introduced to the venerable old historian Geoffrey Blainey, only to be asked by him whether I was related to the Nicholas family of Nicholas Aspro fame. (Australian Dictionary of Biography)
• Then again, Googling for links to them, maybe it’s just as well I’m not: Bloop, bloop, bloop – another one bites the dust.

Didn’t the Nicholas “Aspro” family write the book on the intergenerational pissing away of the family fortune?

• You will learn very little about Melburnians from watching The Real Housewives of Melbourne.

Oh. Vote #1 Alistair Smith.