Author: admin

Well, I have now.

It’s a reasonable surmise that Quora.com had nothing to do with Quora.vn, since they’ve only just launched es.quora.com after years of “no foreign language Quoras”.

Quora Việt Nam – Timeline has a post starting:

Trang chủ Website Hỏi Đáp Của Người Việt

Chắc hẳn bạn đã từng nghe về website hỏi đáp nổi tiếng thế giới http://Quora.com. không ai có thể phủ nhận được mức độ hiểu quả và tính khả thi khi áp dụng mà nó đem lại. nhưng giờ đây chúng tôi đã cố gắng để mang đến cho người dùng việt nam website hỏi đáp ấy bằng tất cả lòng tận tâm và mong muốn được giúp những thắc mắc của các bạn có câu trả lời 1 cách nhanh nhất và đa chiều nhất

Google Translated as:

The Website FAQ’s Quora.vn Vietnam

Surely you’ve heard about the popular question and answer website http://Quora.com world. no one can deny the extent feasible and effective when applied it brings. but now we have tried to bring to Vietnam website users that inquiry with all devotion and desire to assist your questions have an answer one way fastest and most multi-dimensional

Hm.

Language-specific Q&A sites are a wonderful and cool thing.

Using an existing brand for your own Q&A site, with no apparent coordination with the brand owner… not so much.

I don’t want Quora Inc, the Evil Silicon Valley Behemoth Who Won’t Even Open Up An API, to go mediaeval on Quora.vn’s ass; but… this is not really cool.

Not quite clear what your question is. Assuming I’ve understood it:

Koine Greek, like other languages, has a notion of principal parts. There are six tenses you need to know for a verb; once you know them, you can derive the remainder. The six tenses are all indicatives: present; future; aorist active; perfect active; aorist passive; perfect passive.

There are in fact regular classes of verb, derived from the verb root; but there’s a lot of morphophonology happening at the interface of the root and the tense suffix, so you need to be familiar with what the possible tense stems are.

To grapple with the possibilities, read this: How can I learn to individuate ancient Greek verbs? It’s written for Attic, but Koine is not substantially simpler than Attic.

I don’t know the answer, OP.

But the attitude of Christianity towards eroticism is indeed on the ascetic side, and has been since St Paul, and arguably Jesus himself (if you look on someone with lust, poke your eye out). The attitude towards the naked body would follow suit; and of course the Games were explicitly a pagan religious ceremony anyway, which was reason enough to ban them.

Jews are happy to point out that Judaism’s attitude towards sex is much healthier than Christianity’s: where Paul barely tolerates matrimony, the Talmud enjoins a healthy sex life as a conjugal obligation.

It’s not as simple as that; but the Song of Songs is neither here nor there. Yes, when it was composed the Song of Songs was erotic; Wikipedia points out parallels with Mesopotamian and Egyptian love poetry, and the suspicion of an allusion to Tammuz and Ishtar. But Judaism, let alone Christianity in the 4th century AD was not the proto-Judaism of the 10th or 6th century BC, when it was composed. The Song of Songs was only accepted into the Jewish Bible in the second century AD (!), and that only on the condition that it was an allegory for God’s love for Israel:

For instance, the famed first and second century Rabbi Akiva forbade the use of the Song of Songs in popular celebrations. He reportedly said, “He who sings the Song of Songs in wine taverns, treating it as if it were a vulgar song, forfeits his share in the world to come”.

The Talmud’s treatment of Epikoros is a rejection of Hellenistic hedonism, for which Epicurus is the poster boy (fairly or not). For all the disjonts between Judaism and Christianity, I’d have thought Jews and Christians would be united in looking askance at nudity in the Games.

Standard Greek does not. <ch> gets transliterated as /ts/. For example, when I was in Goody’s (the Greek competitor to McDonald’s) and ordered a cheeseburger, my order was relayed as ena tsiz! . You’ll see many Turkish loanwords with /ts/ in them: every single one corresponds to a Turkish <ç>.

On the other hand, many Greek dialects do have a [tʃ] sound, as a palatalised /k/ (which is how the sound originated in English). Confronted with the street name McCutcheon, for example, my mother wrote it down in Greek as <Makakion>. Which, in Cretan dialect, would be pronounced [makatʃon].

Kazantzakis also did something like that in a letter home to his parents from Italy; but I don’t remember what his word was.

Yes, yes, OP, in Cypriot Greek, βίλλα, as a variant of βίλλος, does mean “dick”. Hence, per βίλλα – cySlang (the Cypriot counterpart to urbandictionary) and βίλλα, βίλα – SLANG.gr (the Greek counterpart to urbandictionary), the fans of Marcos Baghdatis would shout:

Του Μάρκου η βίλα γκαστρώνει και καμήλα!
Marcos’ dick will impregnate even a camel!

Hey, don’t blame me for the rhymes of Cypriot Greek.

And so the joke goes around that when the newly arrived Greece Greek tells the Cypriots how much she admires their villas, the embarrassed locals say “we… prefer to use the word επαύλεις here”.

The most authoritative answer I’ve seen is not great: hope that someone has created an Answer wiki, enumerating all the answers, and grouping them into sensible subsets that you might want to concentrate on (or at least, in a numbered list, that you can open one answer at a time).

Short of that, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, keep that page open in a tab, and in God’s name, don’t hit refresh. Which will become difficult if you go offline (e.g. laptop), because Quora’s “Internet disconnected” alert is going to mess up your navigation. Especially once you try to open up each answer.

Or scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, open up every single answer, and as above.

Or scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, open up every single answer, and save the page to disk.

Or find a scraper that Quora has not yet disabled, and be nonchalant about the possibility of violating the Quora Terms Of Service.

Yeah, not a lot of wonderful options, OP.

There’s lots of gendering in language, and people who have studied sociolinguistics more intently than me will be able to offer better examples.

I actually don’t know of instances in Crete that OP has in mind. I do know that in Tsakonia in the 19th century, the palatalised allophone of /r/ appeared to be [r̝], the “Czech r”, for men but not for women.

When there’s a conflict between dialect and the standard language, the tendency for gendered dialect variation can go one of two ways:

• If there is little exposure to the standard language within the community, and you’re in a patriarchal society, then men will have more exposure to the standard language than women, because women are stuck at home, and never hear the standard language spoken at all, while men are out and about, and do hear it. That’s a 19th century Europe thing. In fact, extrapolated to minority languages, you’d get situations where only the menfolk were exposed to the official language of the country—which was confined to the public sphere. Women were excluded from the public sphere, so they did not have access to the official language.
• If there is a lot more exposure to the standard language, and we’re in the 20th century (so women are not stuck at home, and get exposed to radio and TV even if they are), then women will move closer to the standard language, as they tend to be socialised to be more aware of social status and norms of genteelness. Men OTOH will move away from the standard language, because they will have more of their identity invested in notions of localism and parochialism, rather than status. (Yes, yes, generalisations, but that’s what sociolinguists have observed in the UK and US.)

Tough question.

Gillard herself, in her farewell speech, displayed a salutary self-awareness when she said:

I do want to say the reaction to being the first female prime minister does not explain everything about my time in the prime ministership, nor does it explain nothing about my prime ministership.

There was sexist venom around Gillard’s prime ministership; the instances are known and uncontroversial.

But there was also a true disappointment in Gillard. In how her predecessor, a charismatic leader, was deposed without anyone explaining why. In how an engaged, activist education minister was transformed into a rigid, robotic prime minister. In how an atheist in a de facto relationship resisted marriage equality, rather than showing any leadership. In how her Misogyny Speech energised everyone in the world but politically engaged Australians, who knew the context was the whole sordid mess of the speakership of Peter Slipper.

Has it ruined the prime ministership for women? I don’t think so; it’s been two PMs since in the merry-go-round of Australian Federal politics, it’s already “Julia Who?” But then, I didn’t anticipate the outburst of sexism that hounded Gillard to begin with.

Could Julie Bishop do it? Probably not, loyal deputy too often, although she is one of the few members of the Abbott cabinet that commanded any respect at large. Could Penny Wong or Tanya Plibersek? Maybe. We were in a strange regressive place under Abbott, but a lot of people do want to move on. Which is why Turnbull was greeted as a saviour by everyone but the conservative true believers. (Remember that?)

The weirdest sounds cross-linguistically would have to be those with a different airstream mechanism to the normal, pulmonic egressive mechanism.

The normal pulmonic egressive mechanism is simply making the sounds while breathing out of your lungs.

The lingual ingressive mechanism involves making sounds while sucking in air around your tongue. Those are, of course, clicks.

The two other mechanisms are:

• Glottalic ingressive: gulping down around your throat. Those are Implosive consonants. Found in Africa and Southeast Asia.
• Glottalic egressive: popping air out from around your throat. Those are Ejective consonants. Found in the Caucasus, the Americas, and some parts of Africa.

I have several hometowns, but the hometown I’ll pick is Sitia, Lasithi prefecture, Crete. Small, no account place, placid, few tourists.

I’ve made several discoveries about my hometown that came as a surprise to me. They had not exactly been publicised, and they’re embarrassing, so I guess they’re dark secrets. They get progressively darker.

1. Sitia is watched over by the Kazarma fortress, which the Venetians left behind. So you’d assume that Sitia remained a going concern for centuries.

In fact, when you spend more time in Sitia (and more importantly, when you then visit the other three, much bigger main towns of Crete, Iraklio, Hania and Rethymno), you notice that there’s one Venetian building, and no Ottoman buildings. There’s a reason for that: when the Venetians lost the town, there was no Sitia left. The town was abandoned in 1651 (destroyed by the Venetians themselves, Greek Wikipedia tells me), and rebuilt two centuries later, in 1870. By Muslims. Who called it Avinye.

2. There is a couplet that does the rounds of Crete, on the three main towns of Crete.

Οι Χανιώτες για τ’ άρματα,
οι Ρεθυμνιώτες για τα γράμματα,
οι Καστρινοί για το ποτήρι

People from Hania are for weapons, people from Rethymno for learning,
people from Kastro [Iraklio] are for drinking

Now, Sitia may well be a lot smaller than Rethymno, let alone Hania and Iraklio, but it is missing from the couplet. Which is also curiously missing its second rhyme.

No surprise that I never heard how the couplet ends while living in Sitia. As recorded by a 19th century folklorist (Γιατί τους Κρητικούς τους λένε Μανόληδες;), it ends with

οι Λασιώτες όλοι χοίροι or Στειακοί καθάριοι χοίροι

Those from Lasithi are all swine/
Those from Sitia are pure swine

And what do you know. It rhymes after all.

3. Remember how I said Sitia was reestablished by Muslims in 1870?

There’s not a lot of mentions in Sitia in the Australian press, searchable at the magnificent Newspapers Home – Trove site from the National Library of Australia (where any random can correct the OCR).

There is however this.

THE MASSACRES AT SITIA. – LONDON, 10th March. – The Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 – 1954) – 11 Mar 1897

LONDON, 10th March.

The European consuls at Heraklion have confirmed the report received recently that the Christian insurgents had massacred 400 Moslems at Sitia. Several children of Mahometan families were slashed and wounded by the Christians, and in one case the ears of a child were cut off.

No. Somehow, I never heard of that incident while living in Sitia.

(See Cretan State for the 1897 insurrection, which led to Crete being granted autonomy.)