Author: admin

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.)

In this episode of Quora Jeopardy!, I find that the source OP is drawing on (Dimitris Sotiropoulos’ answer to Who is the other Hades and which are their family ties?, see comments) does not necessarily lead to the conclusion he is positing.

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The answer is drawn from the first successful Google hit I got on OP’s source material: Mantziou, Mary. 1990. Euripides fr. 912 [math]N^2[/math] (inc. fab.) Dodone (Philologia) 19: 209–224. http://olympias.lib.uoi.gr/jspui…

The source text is an Orphic Hymn attributed to Euripides, and cited in two sources: Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata V 70,2, and Satyrus the Peripatetic’s Life of Euripides, fr. 37 col iii.

Let me cite Clement’s version from the Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Stromata (Clement of Alexandria)

In the most wonderful harmony with these words, Euripides, the philosopher of the drama, is found in the following words—making allusion, I know not how, at once to the Father and the Son:—

To you, the Lord of all, I bring
Cakes and libations too, O Zeus,
Or Hades would you choose be called;
[Ζεὺς εἴθ’ ᾍδης ὀνομαζόμενος στέργεις]
Do accept my offering of all fruits,
Rare, full, poured forth.

For a whole burnt-offering and rare sacrifice for us is Christ. And that unwittingly he mentions the Saviour, he will make plain, as he adds:—

For you who, ‘midst the heavenly gods,
Jove’s sceptre sway’st, dost also share
The rule of those underground with Hades.
[χθονίων θ’ ᾍδῃ μετέχεις ἀρχῆς]

Then he says expressly:—

Send light to human souls that fain would know
Whence conflicts spring, and what the root of ills,
And of the blessed gods to whom due rites
Of sacrifice we needs must pay, that so
We may from troubles find repose.

[I’ve corrected the translation “underground with Hades”]

The poem is addressed to a god who can choose to be called either Zeus or Hades, and who both holds Zeus’ sceptre, and rules over the chthonic souls.

Clement’s conclusion is that the Orphic hymns anticipate Christian theology, with God the Father as Zeus, God the Son as Hades, and the two being conflated as the one Substance. Satyrus thought this reflected Anaxagoras’ cosmology instead. Other historians of religion have thought the Zeus/Hades blend is Plutus, or Zagreus, or Dionysus or some other Other God, whether Orphic or Chthonic. Mantziou herself (too clever by half) thinks that since this is a necromancy, the Other God is the other god involved in necromancies, Hermes.

February 2016, as far as I can tell. I joined August 2015. I was collapsed quite a bit at the start.

Are we talking about the same Quora editor that counts all non-ASCII characters as two letters (because Unicode is just this passing phase—in the year 2016), and which accepts no Plane 1 characters at all? (Nick Nicholas’ answer to Will Quora ever support emoji?)

… No, OP. I don’t think “unfair” is the adjective you’re looking for.

Report the shortcoming, and a shortcoming it surely is. But, for all that text editors are in fact a solved problem, I can hear the familiar words of my Quora Jedi Master Scott Welch, ringing in my ears…

“Technical debt… Technical debt…”

To my embarrassment, I did not know what the pragmatics wastebasket was, so I did some googling.

• Pragmatics (textbook account)
• Out of the Pragmatic Wastebasket (Bar-Hillel’s note)
• Pragmatics waste-basket

The history of linguistics is a succession of scholars saying: X is what we will pay attention to, and Y is crap we can’t be bothered dealing with, because it’s too messy.

• 500 BC: morphology is all we deal with in grammar
• 100 AD: morphology, (rudimentary) syntax, and rhetoric is all we deal with in grammar, and why you would speak at all is philosophy, not grammar.
• 1850: language change is all we deal with, and what language has ended up as is boring
• 1920: the language system (langue) is what we deal with, and what comes out of people’s mouths (parole) is boring
• 1960: syntax is what we deal with, and semantics is the philosophers’ problem, not ours
• 1970: syntax and semantics is what we deal with, and pragmatics is a philosopher’s invention, not ours.

Now something changed in the 1960s into 1970s.

Sociologists started looking at what came out of people’s mouths, and not just their underlying model of language. That gave rise to sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

Philosophers of language started looking at why people said things in the contexts they did. That gave rise to pragmatics.

Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was as formal a linguist as formal linguists could be. Machine translation people like to burn effigies of him, because Bar-Hillel wrote a report to the US military in the late ’60s, that the effort to date on machine translation was never going to pay off, thereby stopping all research in machine translation for the next 20 years. (He was right, btw: machine translation in practice has nothing to do with formal grammars, which was the route machine translation had been taking. But Chomsky got plenty of NATO funding out of machine translation, before Bar-Hillel’s report.)

Bar-Hillel did something very cool in 1971; especially cool for a formal linguist.

He wrote a little note in Linguistic Inquiry (the home journal of Evil Chomskian Formalists), saying something like this:

“We’ve been treating pragmatics as a waste-basket of random crap that we don’t bother to account for in language. Every so often, someone goes through the waste-basket of random crap, and picks out something they think they can account for in their new shiny formal syntactic–semantic theory.

Instead of treating pragmatics as a waste-basket, and cherrypicking it for bits to account for formally, why don’t we instead start taking pragmatics seriously, and account for the stuff in the “waste-basket” on its own terms?”

The pragmatics waste-basket is what linguists have since been getting away from. Instead of treating it as random crap, shoved into Generative Semantics if it will fit (which is what the fashion was in the late 1960s), pragmatics started being treated seriously as its own discipline, with its own way of explaining phenomena. Just as sociolinguistics and discourse analysis did.

Once more, I’m going to cite the renowned Greek humorist Nikos Tsiforos. It worked for me quite well with Nick Nicholas’ answer to What do Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland think of each other?

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Ελληνική Μυθολογία του Νίκου Τσιφόρου (Μέρος 1)

Once upon a time, there was a guy called Goethe. A German and a sage. But so what if you are a German and a sage? If your time’s up, you’re going to die. So in the year 1832, Johann Wolfgang Goethe decided it was time for him to kick the bucket, and fell into his bed. And when he was about to die, he cried out:

—Light. More light.

That’s what the man said, and he made a most dignified exit into nothingness. But people are cattle and clueless, so they took these words and made them into an omen.

—Just look what the sage said!

—What’d he say?

—More light should flood into humanity. Into our spirit. That we might see the truth clearly.

—He said that, did he!

—Ja!

—Wow.

And noone considered that the poor guy was dying, and he wanted more light, because his eyes were glazing over with death. The lamp grew dark, and at a time like that it didn’t occur to him to utter philosophies and preach nonsense: he found himself, like any human, in an hour of weakness, and spoke it. If a common person had said that, that’s how they’d interpret it. The natural way. But Goethe was a sage. And if one sage says something stupid, all the other sages will work overtime to grant it a deeper meaning; otherwise they won’t be considered sages any more.

The word cat is the same in a lot of languages, for the same reason that Coca-Cola is the same in even more languages. Because most cats were domesticated, and originated, in one place: Egypt.

Not all cats: there was a separate domestication, Wikipedia tells me (Cat), in China. And extremely early domestication in Cyprus as well. (It’s one of those cruel ironies of fate that the site for the 7500 BC cat find in Cyprus is Shillourokambos. “Dog Tail Plain.”)

But the main site from which the languages you have in mind got their word—and their speakers got their cats—was Egypt: we think it’s from the Late Egyptian (1300–700 BC) čaute, ‘female wildcat’. That gave us, inter alia,

• Latin cattus, and all its Romance, Germanic, and Slavonic progeny. Which includes Byzantine Greek kata, from cattus, and Modern Greek ɣata, from Italian gatto .
• Egyptian Arabic keta قطة , as reported by Ahmed Ouda, and Tunisian Arabic قطّوس ‎qaṭṭus, as reported by Wiktionary: cattus – Wiktionary

It didn’t give us Latin feles (which may be cognate with the Welsh for marten, just as the Katharevousa Greek γαλῆ is actually the ancient Greek for ferret). But at some time like 300 AD, the colloquial Roman word borrowed from Egypt started following the cat, and kept on following it throughout Europe.

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I reserve especial ire in this answer for people who do not allow comments on their answers, and then write answers needing correction.

Yes, Arabic script was a spectacularly bad fit for Turkish. But a more proximate reason, surely, was that mass literacy presupposes printing—and the Ottomans did not allow printing in a Muslim language. (They didn’t allow it in Christian Greek either, but at least Venetian printers were able to capitalise on that.)

Global spread of the printing press

Due to religious qualms, Sultan Bayezid II and successors prohibited printing in Arabic script in the Ottoman empire from 1483 on penalty of death, but printing in other scripts was done by Jews as well as the Greek and Armenian communities (1515 Saloniki, 1554 Bursa (Adrianople), 1552 Belgrade, 1658 Smyrna). In 1727, Sultan Achmed III gave his permission for the establishment of the first legal print house for printing secular works in Arabic script (religious publications still remained forbidden), but printing activities did not really take off until the 19th century.

1727: First press for printing in Arabic established in the Ottoman Empire, against opposition from the calligraphers and parts of the Ulama. It operated until 1742, producing altogether seventeen works, all of which were concerned with non-religious, utilitarian matters. Ibrahim Muteferrika.

1779: Abortive attempt to revive printing in the Ottoman lands, by James Mario Matra (Briton).

[Btw, Wikipedia? What printing in Greek communities? Judaeo-Greek doesn’t really count as the “Greek community” in this context. Citation needed.]

On the late adoption of the printing press in the Ottoman Empire

It is clear from the historical evidence that the professional manuscript scribes were violently against the printing press because they did not want to lose their jobs.

…

It is not so clear that the clergy of that era were against the printing press even though historians show evidence that it was the case. In the current intellectual climate of religious fervor in Turkey the prevailing opinion is that the clergy of the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries were not against the printing press. They say that the printing press was rejected because of the strong opposition of the calligrapher/scribe class. This begs the question: if the clergy were not against the printing press why Muteferrika or others were not allowed to print religious books?

Myths and reality about the printing press in the Ottoman Empire (which looks like a weak apologist account to me—they didn’t allow it because it wasn’t as pretty as manuscript? And only the scholars needed to read anyway? Really?)

Printing banned by Islam? (Christian polemicist, but consistently with scrupulous scholarship)