Author: admin

Why did Quora rescind automatically forcing users to follow any question they answer? It was a great feature previously (and the time before that, though that was before my time on Quora). Having to follow manually each time is extremely annoying. At least make it optional under settings.

What infuriates me most about this feature on-again off-again (as opposed to all the other myriad missteps of Quora Product “Development”) is that it was only divulged to the Top Writers. Presumably, it was rescinded in response to the preferences of the Top Writers: Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer to At what points has Quora enabled and disabled the feature that automatically follows questions that you answer?

The Top Writers are not representative of all Quora writers. And this preference certainly isn’t mine.

Adding my reaction to the thread when I saw it:

https://www.quora.com/My-partner…

I can only think that this perspective on who is and isn’t Dutch is tied up with Western European, civic notions of nationhood, rather than stereotypically Eastern European, ethnic notions: the 2nd generation Surinamese born in Rotterdam is more Dutch than the 2nd generation Dutch-Canadian, because he lives there and is acculturated there.

There is one Quoran who upvotes just about everything I write (or at least, did the first few months I was here). He’s one of the few Quorans I knew online pre-Quora. I appreciate it: I regard him as my Quora sponsor.

There are Quorans I consider close Quora-friends, and I upvote most of their stuff I see in my feed, as a mark of group loyalty. Not all of it; if it was unspectacular, or trollish, or something I both disagree with and think was not well argued, I’ll decline to upvote. And hope they don’t notice. I don’t want to upvote automatically, but I will upvote by default.

In both cases, these are people I’ve gotten to know already. If some random starts upvoting me lots, well, I’ll make a point of getting to know them; but if we have that kind of overlapping interests, my experience until now has been that I already have gotten to know them.

As for comments: no, I cherish comments. If anything, I am the one creeping out other people with comments. Some people make it clear that they appreciate the banter, and reciprocate. Some people make it clear that they don’t; well, their loss.

What are your reasons for doing so?

• Opacity of moderation.
• Lack of Quora staff engagement with writers.
• Commoditisation of the community.
• Opaque corporate direction, and what I can see, I don’t like.
• Mistrust of Quora longevity.
• Everything that Scott Welch has ever said about Quora.
• In sum: what Quora Inc does—or fails to do

What are not your reasons for doing so?

• The failings of the Quora community:
• Lapses in BRNB (I’ve been online for 25 years, I can deal)
• Low quality questions, particularly in my home fields
• Anon (though I take solace in lampooning Anon when they deserve it)
• Controversies (I keep well away, I’m a pretty irenic sort)
• Homework questions
• Mistargeted A2As
• The astonishingly poor research done on some questions (that often ends up being an incentive for me to do better).

How long has this been a consideration?

• Since Jimmy Liu was banned, so two months ago. On strike in support of Jay Liu by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile, I will not hit your Report button by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile. The first ban of someone I followed, which got me researching the innards of Quora.
• No, I’m not fricking over it.

What prevents you from doing so?

• The friends I’ve made. I love youse guys by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile. (I’ll update it eventually.)
• The writers I’ve admired from a safe distance.
• The opportunities to do research and learn something.

How long have you been active in Quora?

• A year this month

What Topics do you most frequent?

• Not US politics
• Definitely not anything to do with guns
• Nothing to do with theism/atheism. (Academic interest in religion as an atheist is fine.)
• Language stuff
• Greek stuff
• Increasingly, Quora meta-debates
• Occasionally, music and conlangs

1–2 hours a day. More than I should be…

I still have a soft spot for GraphicConverter. Quite similar to Paint in its basic features.

There’s more to Judaism than the Tanach.

As discussed in Bosom of Abraham and Paradise, the notion of heaven as a place where the righteous dead go, rather than Sheol for everyone, is a notion that was kicking around in late Judaism, including Jewish papyri and apocrypha such as 4 Maccabees.

That understanding of heaven is mentioned a couple of times in the Gospels, and was developed further by early Christian writers; but it was not alien to the Judaism of Jesus’ time.

Ditto hell: Gehenna as an antecedent to Hell is not much in evidence in the apocrypha, but it’s there in the Targums and the Talmud.

(I gotta say, btw, this was the result of 5 minutes on Wikipedia, and I’m astonished that none of the answers given looked into Jewish antecedents to heaven and hell.)

See also:

• Are there Jewish equivalents of heaven and hell?
• Do Jewish people believe in heaven or hell?

What they said. For fieldwork, you get a flat-file database for organising your field notes and automatically generating glosses and dictionaries. (A relational database is overkill.) Toolbox (The Field Linguist’s Toolbox) and its predecessor The Linguist’s Shoebox from SIL International are the default tools.

Databases are less useful than you might think, though I found they were useful for typological work (if you’re doing wide surveys of languages).

For Computational Linguistics, you learn Perl (if you’re living 20 years ago like I still am) or Python, and you get hold of a good software library. The premier one seems to be Natural Language Toolkit. Treat it as a starting point, but it is a very good starting point. Enough that I’ve winced and taught myself enough Python to use it, though I still find Python distasteful.

If you’re doing phonetics, you will be doing a lot of IT, to get the data, and to get statistics about the data: phonetics is a lot closer to disciplines like psychology. Like Joonas Vakkilainen, you will get familiar with R. (Or Python, I guess.) Ditto sociolinguistics, as Joonas said. But for most other fields of linguistics, you won’t likely need more stats than you can get out of Excel.

Sorry for 4 month delay in A2A, Z-Kat.

Not a hip hop lyric, but then the OP didn’t put that in the question.

When I was a young lad, I lived in Crete, and I explored Cretan folk music, because that’s what you hear in Crete. One of the greats of Cretan folk music was Kostas Mountakis. Nikos Xilouris was greater and more versatile (and more photogenic), but Mountakis established the groundwork for the modern folk tradition.

One song I particularly liked was Άχι και σαραντάρισα, “Alas, I’m forty”:

Alas I’m forty by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile

Alas I’m forty, fit no more for love.
I feel like running crazy down the streets.

[…]

What’s to become of me? My soul, it shivers.
Like a snail feeler my gall bladder shrivels.

[tʃe leo ida θa ʝeno, tʃe tremi i psiçi mu
sa du xoxʎu to tʃerato ezarose i xoʎi mu]

I heard that song when I was maybe ten.

It was only last year that I realised that the song was censored. Last year.

It isn’t the gall bladder /xoli/ that’s shrivelling. It’s a word that rhymes with gall bladder.

And now you know what the Greek dialect word /psoli/ means.

Dedicated to Michael Masiello, for our latest exchange.

I am not aware of any Orthodox ban on laypeople buying bibles, if they could afford them. It may or may not have been seen as odd before the invention of printing.

The Greek Orthodox Church did have a massive problem with translating the Bible into Modern Greek, to the extent of getting a ban on translations written into the Greek constitution. It has been possible for laypeople to buy translations since 1638 (Bible translations into Greek); but the church of Greece seems to have only officially signed off on translations since the 1990s.

The resistance was more about fetishising the source language than about wanting the great unwashed to gain access to the original. The uproar around Ioannikios Kartanos’ paraphrase of the Bible in 1536 seems likewise to have been more about the fact that he used an Italian source text with a lot of apocryphal interpolations. But the Orthodox church was certainly no fan of people making up their own minds about how to make sense of the Bible.