Author: admin

Depends. Do we get to keep comments?

If we do, I’m fine. And expect to see a lot more comments consisting of “this” and “+1”. Comments are more substantive feedback anyway.

If not, then, as I’ve said here before: if I wanted to speak in an anechoic chamber, I’d still be writing academic papers.

I’ll start by saying that the expression (lit. “somewhere and where”) is unfamiliar to me. Which makes me curious when it became common.

The related question, αραιά και που “sparsely and [some]where” refers to time: “occasionally, now and again”, rather than “in scattered locations, here and there”. The metaphorical use of spatial for temporal expressions is a linguistic commonplace.

The examples Google gives me of κάπου και που, on the other hand, are locative, temporal, or ambiguous:

• Τέσσερα χρόνια μετά, διαπιστώνουμε κάπου και που ότι φυτρώνουν “Κιμωλίες” σε όλη την Ελλάδα. Four years on, were see that “Chalk” sites are springing up here and there/(now and again) throughout Greece.
• Σε όλα τα ραντεβού πληρώνουμε, και κάπου και που μας κάνουνε κανένα τραπέζι ή κανένα μικρό δώρο. We pay at all our meetings, and (here and there)/now and again they take us out to dinner or give us a small gift.
• Συνέχισε με την επίσης κωμική τηλεοπτική επιτυχία “Dharma και Greg” και κάπου και που εμφανίζεται σε μικρούς ρόλους. She went on to the other successful comedy Dharma and Greg, and she appears here and there/now and again in minor roles.
• Μιλήσαμε για τις Λάκκες που κάπου και που έβλεπες σπίτια και πιο πολύ καλύβες We spoke about Lakkes, where here and there you would see houses, but mostly you’d see huts.
• ενώ παλεύει ακόμα με τις προσωπικές της εξαρτήσεις και κάπου και που κάνει και καμία τηλεοπτική εμφάνιση [Heather Locklear] is still struggling with personal addictions, and now and again makes the odd appearance on TV

So the impression I get is that it’s about both time and place. But because the expression is unfamiliar to me, I hereby request answers from people living in Greece.

EDIT: from comments

The που in που και που, αραιά και που, and presumably κάπου και που is the stressed interrogative locative, πού “where?” So something like “I see him—sparsely; and where?”, “I see him—where?, and where?”, “I see him—somewhere; and where?” All, I presume, as a rhetorical question, something like “I see him; God knows where.”

Compare the use of the stressed interrogative πώς “how?” in κάνει πώς και πώς να τον δει “he acts “how? and how?” to see him” = “he is very eager to see him” It’s something like, he’s asking out loud, giddy with excitement “how [will it happen]? how [will I act]?”

The question presupposes that only citizens are entitled to use any service provider in the US with a customer phone line.

To the best of my recollection, I was able to get PacBell while living in the States, without taking out citizenship.

Quora Inc stepping out of the echo chamber of wherever it’s getting its feedback from (not www.facebook. com/groups/quoratopwriters “Quora Top Writers”, and I doubt it’s even www.facebook. com/groups/quorawriters/ “Quora Writers Feedback”),

and instead, looking at answers on Quora, to questions like this.

Or this: What are the things on Quora that annoy you?

Or this: How could Quora be improved? If you were running the product/technology team at Quora, what would you do to improve the service?

Or this: What features would make Quora better?

Or this: What currently annoys you about Quora (2016)?

Or this: Rage against Quora

Hilarity abounds about #censusfail, the crash of the online census on August 9 2016: Census in Australia. And I will admit that, like millions of Australians that were under the impression we had to complete the census on that night (so the whole country hit the same server at 8 PM), I had a lot of merriment following the #censusfail hashtag on Twitter in between hitting Refresh (and the occasional ping).

But as a kinda public servant, I’m saddened. I’m saddened that the public’s trust in the Australian Bureau of Statistics has been trashed. I’m saddened that the data quality of the 2016 census will take a severe beating. I’m saddened that the census has ended up politicised.

Many people (particularly my fellow public servants) have been blaming the government for this, for stripping the ABS of funding. And yes, the rush to doing the census online was motivated by cost-cutting rather than efficiency. But the hubris and miscommunications out of the ABS, about the ability of their systems to deal with the load, aren’t the government’s fault. And no, I don’t buy it that hackerz brought the site down, rather than having five million citizens log in at once. Few Australians do.

[MEME DELETED]

“1 Million Forms Per Hour”: the amount of traffic the ABS stress-tested for. Double their expected volume. A fifth of the volume expected by anybody else.

I hate to agree with anything Newscorp publishes, but this nails it: http://www.news.com.au/technolog…

AUSTRALIA just lost something rare. The Census was one of the national institutions we truly trusted. Now that trust is gone.

It’s an old surname: a scribe Niketas Mavronis is recorded in 1285: Σημειώματα-Κώδικες – View Simeioma

The stem is pretty clearly μαύρος “black, swarthy”; the -vr- is something of a giveaway, and the name doesn’t particularly look Slavonic or Aromanian. (1285 is too early for Arvanite or Turkish.) The -ώνης could mean the surname is derived from μαυρώνω “to blacken”, but that looks forced.

Most plausibly, -ώνης is some sort of diminutive or name suffix. This site ΤΑ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΕΠΩΝΥΜΑ‏ μια μελέτη και η Ιστορία τους. explains the suffix of Κοτσώνης Kotsonis as a diminutive of Kotsos < Kostas, adducing the colloquial diminutive (neuter) κλεφτρόνι “little thief”, and the surnames Γεωργιώνης, Γιαννακαρώνης, Διακώνης, Δροσώνης (from George, Big Little John, Deacon, Fresh [proper name]).

The Acheron river was reputed in antiquity to be the gateway to Hades.

Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer to Are there any Greek towns built along the Acheron river in Greece? recounted driving through the drained Acherusian lake, and getting lost in the middle of the night, after a village festival.

https://www.quora.com/Are-there-…

On the 15th of August, Feast Day of the Dormition, commemorating the ascent of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the Heavens,

you and yours were tipsily driving through fog and darkness, INTO THE VERY GATES OF HADES?!

Why, yes, I do think I have visual of the occasion…

See: What percentage of modern Greek could still be understood by people in Ancient Greece? How much of ancient Greek could be understood by speakers of modern Greek?

Not a whole lot. Consider:

• Only very few scripts even have a case distinction: Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian. Georgian and Cherokee are picking up case now, but that’s not because they need to, that’s because they’re being culturally influenced from hegemonic scripts.
• Languages vary wildly in what they choose to capitalise. German capitalises nouns; most languages don’t. Modern languages capitalise starts of sentences; mediaeval languages did not, and editions of Classical Latin and Greek, and Mediaeval Latin, do not. The only words consistently capitalised are proper names.
• It’s nice to single out proper names, since they can be confused out of context with common nouns; hieroglyphics used cartouches for that reason. But it’s not essential.

So, what would the world have lost? A little bit of ambiguity around proper names in European languages—which non-European languages have never found to be that much of a problem.

Of course, you would also have missed out on Studly caps and CamelCase. But human civilisation coped without them until the 1970s…

No idea whether the Sorbs are part-Gothic, or even how you could tell.

I have another, more obscure instance though.

Gothic survived in Gothia (Principality of Theodoro) in the Crimea, up until the 16th century.

Gothic shifted in the Crimea to Greek. In fact, the Gothic speakers that Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq recorded were giving their Gothic nouns with Greek articles.

Of the Greeks of the Crimea, in turn, many shifted to speaking Crimean Tatar language. Their variant of Tatar is called Urum language (i.e. Rum, Roman—that is, Greek).

The Greek Orthodox population of Crimea, who called themselves Rumei in Greek and Urum in Tatar, were resettled in 1778 to the area around Mariupol in the Ukraine: the Greek-speakers in the surrounding countryside, the Tatar-speakers in the town. Mariupol is (just) under Ukrainian control, and borders the Russian separatist areas.

Greek and Urum are both under language shift to Russian (this is eastern Ukraine). And one would expect that they are intermarrying with ethnic Russians.

And, one would think, there would be some Crimean Gothic blood in that ethnic group of Greek/Urum speakers originally from the Crimea.

So… yes. There’s a likely “Other”.