As mentioned in many other recent questions on this, Quora has tinkered with its grammar bot in the past month, and lots of questions are being dinged that only a robot would find objectionable.

I’m getting these too. All I can say is, I randomly reword and keep trying; and avoid anything syntactically complex. I have had the Quora Bot and QCR edit war at least once: What does the Balkan phrase “nemo laffe” mean?

Ah, a lot of doom and gloom here from other respondents.

I’ll admit that all I know about Shetland is that they have ponies, and all I know about Orkney is “huh, isn’t that halfway to Norway already?” But I knew Norn existed. I’ve had a quick look at Wikipedia (and pasted links in details).

And I’ll post not specifics (a Shetlander or Orcadian will need to supply those); but some questions to ask, and some stuff I’ve gleaned from both reading, and a friend working on language reclamation here in Australia.

Will you get the kind of revival that Hebrew had? Of course not. The Jews of Palestine spoke different languages, and even when they didn’t, they were strongly motivated to abandon their native languages. The Ottomans and British weren’t coercing their language onto the Jews of Palestine. The kibbutzim were like the plantations that pidgins developed in, only not coercive.

Obviously, that’s not happening in Norn territory. Everyone speaks English, everyone will keep speaking English, and a revived Norn would only ever be a part-time hobby thing.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s nothing not real about that. But let’s stop comparing Norn to Hebrew, as the measure of a successful revival case. The proper comparison is with Cornish. (Which features in How many dead languages have successfully been revived as spoken languages of a group of people in the modern world?) And Cornish has not been an utter failure; people speak it and write it. Even if it is more emblematic than anything else in Cornwall.

So. Can Nynorn get to the status of Cornish? Well, let’s see.

• It’ll need strong Shetlander/Orcadian nationalism. Strong enough for people to see the point in investing their time, seeking each other out to chat, organise cultural revival festivals featuring it, memorise the Hildina ballad (the one surviving non-trivial text). Nynorn needs to be the vehicle of a culture: it needs to motivate people.
• I don’t know whether there is strong Shetlander/Orcadian nationalism. Without it, the revival’s going to be pretty damn marginal.
• The naysayers on the forums, though, and anyone speaking of utility, can kiss my conlanger tuchus. Noone’s putting a gun to their head to learn Nynorn. Or French for that matter. If they think it’s a waste of time, they can go have a party with all the shmucks who are aghast I’d spent time on Klingon. As long as they don’t get in the way of anyone who does want to learn Nynorn.
• It does NOT need a huge well-documented corpus of original Norn. Which is just as well, ’cause we don’t have one.
• Yes, Nynorn is going to be a linguistic fiction, based on analogy with Faroese to fill in the blanks. Big deal. Cornish Mark #1 used Breton to fill in the blanks. Australian languages get revived based on a couple of scrappy word lists and triangulation.
• The point is not that Nynorn be a completely historically accurate replica of 16th century Norn. The point is that it be good enough to be serviceable to the community. There are Aboriginal communities who were quite content with getting just a dozen words back, to inject into their Aboriginal English: it was enough for their purposes.
• The error of Cornish (leading to Cornish Mark #2 and Cornish Mark #3) was thinking it needed to be more and more historically accurate. Why? You’re not going in a time machine any time soon. Language revival does not need to go all Jurassic Park. If you can understand the Hildina and can still talk in Nynorn about buying a pint of lager and a pony (or whatever it is people talk about over there), you’re good. The perfect must not be allowed to be the enemy of the good.
• My friend was skipping the ergative in her revivals, because the tribe she was working with couldn’t get their heads around it. The linguists shook their heads. But my friend wasn’t doing the revival work for the linguists, or for herself (who, after all, knew perfectly well what an ergative is). She was doing it for the community. And it does the community no good if you revive a language for them, that they can’t wrap their heads around.
• Dialects get in the way, because revival is only practical around a single standard.
• Promoting standard forms of Irish and Scots Gaelic through the radio actually backfired: the native speakers of Irish and Gaelic got even more disheartened, because they found that not only was their mountain gibberish not the Queen’s English, it wasn’t even the Queen’s Celtic. A Greek dialectologist like me is not going to be grateful to the Greek government for sending teachers to the Ukraine: it’s not like they’re sent to teach the version of Greek that’s actually spoken there.
• And of course, if the revival is to be driven by local pride, picking a non-local dialect is going to be a funny way for the locals to show pride.
• That won’t be as much of an issue for Nynorn, because noone has spoken Norn for a couple of centuries. But Orkney Norn and Shetland Norn look very different; and imposing a single Nynorn over both might be a bad idea, especially if the locals know that Orkney Norn and Shetland Norn look very different. (I have no idea if that’s what’s happening.)

Flag of Orkney.

Flag of Shetland.

Shetland ponies in Shetland.

In I love youse guys, I praised all the great Quorans I had come to admire and love in my first nine months here.

I will now do the same for the next five months, with all the new friends and admirees I have made since.

To Jeremy Markeith Thompson (too tall to fit the frame; and I can’t draw someone sitting cross-legged); Mohammed Khateeb Kamran (Hansolophontes); Michael J. McFadden (I miss passive smoking); Alberto Yagos (whose third job is correcting my Latin conjugation); Habib Fanny (Habib le toubib qui rit); Curtis Lindsay (who has dragged me kicking and screaming to Chopin); Gareth Jones (the metricist of the North West); Steven de Guzman (the first of many Lazaruses); Scott Welch (my True Quora Master); Miguel Paraz (my next door neighbour); Edward Conway (the most polite Quoran conceivable); Steve Theodore (the Classical prestidigitator); Uri Granta (the Zarphatic mathemagician); Vladimir Menkov (Slavicist of Champions); Adam Mathias Bittlingmayer (expert in Four Homelands):

I love reading you, I love seeing you, I love bantering with you, and I love learning from you.

I love youse guys.

From what I gather as an outsider, it depends on the community. Khomeini made a fatwa accepting transgender women, FWIW, while other Muslim countries do not:

Pegah Esmaili’s answer to Does economic, social and political progress lead to reform in Islam or does reform in Islam lead to economic, social and political progress?

See also:

• What does Islam say about transsexuality, their rights, social status etc.? How does it feel to be a Muslim transsexual, what issues do they face?
• What does it feel like to be a Muslim and transgender?

Good luck in all your journeys.

Originally Answered:

What was your “15 minutes of fame”?

Oh, that’s easy.

Hamlet – Klingon Language Wiki

translators: Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader

Good to know someone read the footnotes: Klingon <i>Hamlet</i> Revisited

Until I googled the pic, I had no idea about the 2015 German edition. Which looks way cooler:

Hope it’s the Schlegel & Tieck translation. Eh, I mean Crude Federation Parody. Of course.

For a few years afterwards, I’d get these vague filtered distortions of me coming through the Interwebs. “Did you hear about some nutjob linguist who translated the whole Bible into Klingon? And all of Shakespeare? And he taught his kid to speak Klingon? And then he demanded that the government provide him a Klingon translator? What a loser! What a legend! What a loser!”

The pinnacle was when Michael Dorn himself, visiting Australia, muttered, “Some guy has even translated Shakespeare. I don’t know why these guys aren’t curing cancer instead or something.”

That job, Mr wI’orv, I leave to Habib Fanny.

(All medical researchers, and for that matter all doctors, are working on curing cancer. Aren’t they?)

Originally Answered:

Can you mention an upbeat and happy-sounding song that has a sad/depressing meaning?

Australian anthems: Cold Chisel – Khe Sanh

Rollicking strophic, jolly country rock song—about a Vietnam Vet adrift and addicted back home. A song dear to the heart of all Australians my age and up.

A2A Hansolophontes. (Sorry, Khateeb, but you walked into that one.) (Ἁνσολοφόντης. Looks nice…)

I’ll say what I think they feel, but I’ll go a roundabout way about it.

What do Greeks of my upbringing and circumstances feel about ethnic Greek converts to Islam?

Well, if they were pre-population exchange, they’re not around any more, and folklore just called them Turks anyway; so Greeks are blissfully unaware that any ethnic Greek could be anything but Greek Orthodox. Greeks of my upbringing and circumstances are also taught that Muslims are the Other. Not sure whether all of them were also taught that they eat babies.

So, what do they make of Yusuf Islam?

Four sentiments.

• Who? Not sure he was ever big in Greece to begin with.
• Betrayal. I think this will be more pronounced among Greek Cypriots, since they have an ongoing cold war with Turkish Cypriots, and Yusuf embraced the religion of the enemy.
• Unease, and/or embarrassment. Embracing Islam is not Something that Greeks Do. I read the local Greek paper yesterday, and there was the big front cover article about John Podesta’s wikileak, which was an excuse for “did you know John Podesta’s mother is Greek?” I don’t think you’ll get as many of those about Cat Stevens, let alone Yusuf Islam.
• “Screw him, he’s a half-Greek diasporan anyway.” Well, actually, that’s just the same as “Unease, and/or embarrassment”. They don’t say that about John Podesta.
• Well, they do say that about John Podesta; but not as the first thing they say.

I’m not proud of this, Khateeb, but for my generation, I think the unease will be pretty common.

I went to a Muslim wedding once, and there was a Greek convert there, skullcap and all. He was delighted to find a Greek there to talk to; I’m sure that, given how conservative the diaspora is, he wouldn’t find that many. I remember that I chatted to him, but I did feel uneasy. Again, not proud that I did, but there’s a long history of being brought up to think of Muslims as the Other; and finding “one of your own” joining the Other is uncomfortable.

I’m sorry if this answer made you uncomfortable. But I suspect you understand all too well how people can feel that way about Othering…

Dimitris Almyrantis will have a better informed and more up to date answer.

I’ve seen other such expressions, such as cod-Latin, and cod-Spanish. Cod-Latin is a synonym of Dog Latin, a fake Latin used playfully to imitate real Latin. The Wikipedia example is

Stormum surgebat et boatum oversetebat
The storm rose up and overturned the boat

Illegitimis non carborundum is another such instance. (“Don’t let the bastards get you down.”)

Cod-Greek would similarly be fake Ancient Greek, made up with English words and vaguely Greek-looking endings.

Got any references, OP?

Nick. From Greek Nikolaos, Victory of the People. The name shows up in antiquity, in its Attic variant Nikoleōs, and got enshrined among Greeks via Saint Nicholas. Too vernacular for the late Byzantine historian Chalkokondyles, who flipped his first name around to Laonikos.

Nicolaus in Latin, Nicolas in French and Middle English, as featured in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. When the Renaissance came, English scribes realised French had taken out a few Greek h’s. So they put h’s in everywhere. Including Nicholas.

Uri Granta informs me that the Hebrew equivalent is Amichai: If you were to Hebraize your surname, what would you choose? A blessing upon his house: it’s certainly a cooler name than Victor.

Nick Nicholas. See Nick Nicholas’ answer to How did your parents decide on your name? for the story there.

For an added bonus, the surnames of my four grandparents.

Father’s Father: Hadjimarcou. Of Mark the Pilgrim

FM: Haralambous. Of Haralambos, “Shining with Joy” (a saint’s name)

MF: Lykakis. Wolf-son. -akis is the now obligatory Cretan patronymic suffix.

MM: Sfendourakis. Slingshot-son.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, tuning up. From the best seats I’ve ever had in a concert: choir stalls.

This was the performance of Mahler’s 6th during which my wife, somehow, fell asleep. Much to Victoria Weaver’s merriment.