Category: Uncategorized

Inspired by the last post, I thought I’d go through the last year’s worth of posts on Quora Product Updates, and check on their longevity.

• A New Answer Tab by Sherwin Wu on Quora Product Updates (2016–07–28). Still there.
• Improving the Reporting Experience by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2016–07–30). Since retracted.
• Elimination of Topic-Based Moderation by Jay Wacker on Quora Product Updates (2016–08–20). Retraction.
• Testing Changes to Adding Questions Anonymously by Riley Patterson on Quora Product Updates (2016–08–27). Test announcement.
• Answer Footer Policy Announcement by Jay Wacker on Quora Product Updates (2016–08–31). Policy announcement. Still applies, we think.
• Easier access to ‘Edit Answer’ and ‘Suggest Edits’ by Michael Ran Chen on Quora Product Updates (2016–09–08). Still there, although it briefly went missing.
• Announcing the New Policy on Question Topics by Jay Wacker on Quora Product Updates (2016–09–17). Policy announcement. Still applies, we think.
• New Comment Controls for Writers by Vanessa Tan on Quora Product Updates (2016–09–21). Still there.
• A New Way to See Answers from People You Follow by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2016–09–29). Since retracted.
• Removing Endorsements by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates (2016–10–29). Retraction.
• Improving Reading and Writing from Feeds by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2016–11–22). Some of this I think has been retracted, i.e. the greying out.
• Show your expertise with credentials by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Product Updates (2016–12–06). Still there.
• Improving Anonymity at Quora by Riley Patterson on Quora Product Updates (2017–01–14). Announcement.
• Official Quora Chrome Extension Update: Ask Questions Easily by Sumi Kim on Quora Product Updates (2017–01–24). Presumably still there.
• Improving Bug Reporting on Mobile by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2017–01–27). I assume still there.
• Featured Comments by Kelvin Ho on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–02). Superseded two months later (with several months of random alternation).
• Upcoming Changes to Anonymity on Quora by Riley Patterson on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–10). Still there.
• Change to Most Viewed Writer by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–14). Retraction.
• Changes to Trending Topics by Abhinav Sharma on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–18). Retraction.
• Helping Writers Get the Perfect Question by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–28). Still there.
• Introducing Embedded Tweets by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2017–03–03). Still there.
• More Visibility for High-Quality Comments by Diana Gerr on Quora Product Updates (2017–03–31). Still there.
• Highlighting Connections Across Quora by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Product Updates (2017–04–26). Since retracted.
• Removing Knowledge Prizes by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates (2017–04–28). Retraction.
• New Question Asking Experience on Mobile by Henry Modisett on Quora Product Updates (2017–05–03). Still there.
• Video on Quora by Tommy MacWilliam on Quora Product Updates (2017–05–16). Still there, I assume.

So: in one year,

• 26 posts.
• 4 are announcements.
• 12 are for features that are still in place.
• 6 are withdrawals of features.
• 4 are features that were since withdrawn, or superseded. (None reported explicitly.)

• Highlighting Connections Across Quora by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Product Updates (April 26, 2017)
• What do you think of Quora’s elimination of the timeline for answers? (July 25, 2017)

Not that I actually know much about Homeric Greek, but the infinitive does work better than the imperative, because it makes it less personal and more gnomic: it is a statement to the world, not a command to the individual. Although in context, it is not a command anyway, but reported speech:

Ever to Excel – Wikipedia

“Hippolochus begat me. I claim to be his son, and he sent me to Troy with strict instructions: Ever to excel, to do better than others, and to bring glory to your forebears, who indeed were very great … This is my ancestry; this is the blood I am proud to inherit.”

So grabbing Homer’s “ever to excel”, and changing “excel” to “ascend” in the infinitive, would be a good thing. Although I’d go with an antick Homeric infinitive, so αἰὲν ἀναβαίμεναι, rather than ἀναβαίνειν.

But you want to be careful that “ascend” in Greek has the same connotations as “excelsior”. Looking at LSJ, I’m seeing ἀναβαίνω have meanings like “go up to heaven”, “trample on the dead”, and “go on board a ship”; we can pass by “go on a podium to make a speech” as Attic, and “get on top of” for sexual purposes as… well, you know, I don’t know if we can rule that one out. 🙂

I’d look for a verb that’s less ambiguous, and more explicitly about excelling. Citius altius fortius doesn’t include amplius “further”, but I’m thinking ὑπερβάλλω: yes, in Modern Greek that only means “to exaggerate”, but in Ancient Greek its primary meaning is “to shoot beyond [the target]”, and thus “to excel”, “to surpass”. So αἰὲν ὑπερβαλέειν “always to overshoot”. For some extra archaism, make like Germanic and do tmesis: ὑπὲρ αἰὲν βαλέειν “always to shoot over”.

Clearly so. For example:

Do Want / Do Not Want

One might argue that the phonological inventory of Gothic is a spectacularly bad match for that of Modern English. But then again, so was the phonological inventory of Latin.

I think you can, so long as you hold your nose and write vowels as a one to one match with Modern English; you’re not really going to get anything sensible otherwise.

• /f/ and /v/ aren’t differentiated, and they weren’t differentiated in Old English either; we could write <v> as <f>, or <u> or <w> or as <90> (which is a spare letter).
• No <tʃ> (our <ch>), and not much of a soft <c> either. We can press the <x> character into service for one or both.
• No /dʒ/ (our <j>; the Gothic <j> is our <y>). We could give up and make <j> ambiguous between /dʒ/ and /j/, or we could write /w/ as <ƕ> (wh), reuse <w/y> for /j/, and move <j> to /dʒ/. Yuck.
• No /ð/, but that’s ok, <th> is already ambiguous within English.
• No /ʃ/, just as there isn’t one as a letter in English (<sh>). I guess we won’t avoid h-digraphs after all.

… So, yeah, you *could* write English with the Gothic alphabet, but it would be quite awkward in places, and it would not do English justice. Where there’s a will there’s a way, I guess, but it would certainly not be child’s play. Every sentence would have some lack.

Or, to put that last paragraph in Gothic:

… so, jeah, jou kould write english wiþ þe goþik alfabet, but it would be qite awqard in plases, and it would not do english jhustise. ƕere þeres a will þeres a waj, i guess, but it would sertainli not be xilds plaj. eweri sentense would hawe some lakk.

[math]unicode{x2026} unicode{x10343}unicode{x10349},[/math] [math]unicode{x1033E}unicode{x10334}unicode{x10330}unicode{x10337},[/math] [math]unicode{x1033E}unicode{x10349}unicode{x1033F}[/math] [math]unicode{x1033A}unicode{x10349}unicode{x1033F}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10333}[/math] [math]unicode{x10345}unicode{x10342}unicode{x10339}unicode{x10344}unicode{x10334}[/math] [math]unicode{x10334}unicode{x1033D}unicode{x10332}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10339}unicode{x10343}unicode{x10337}[/math] [math]unicode{x10345}unicode{x10339}unicode{x10338}[/math] [math]unicode{x10338}unicode{x10334}[/math] [math]unicode{x10332}unicode{x10349}unicode{x10338}unicode{x10339}unicode{x1033A}[/math] [math]unicode{x10330}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10346}unicode{x10330}unicode{x10331}unicode{x10334}unicode{x10344},[/math] [math]unicode{x10331}unicode{x1033F}unicode{x10344}[/math] [math]unicode{x10339}unicode{x10344}[/math] [math]unicode{x10345}unicode{x10349}unicode{x1033F}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10333}[/math] [math]unicode{x10331}unicode{x10334}[/math] [math]unicode{x10335}unicode{x10339}unicode{x10344}unicode{x10334}[/math] [math]unicode{x10330}unicode{x10345}unicode{x10335}unicode{x10330}unicode{x10342}unicode{x10333}[/math] [math]unicode{x10339}unicode{x1033D}[/math] [math]unicode{x10340}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10330}unicode{x10343}unicode{x10334}unicode{x10343},[/math] [math]unicode{x10330}unicode{x1033D}unicode{x10333}[/math] [math]unicode{x10339}unicode{x10344}[/math] [math]unicode{x10345}unicode{x10349}unicode{x1033F}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10333}[/math] [math]unicode{x1033D}unicode{x10349}unicode{x10344}[/math] [math]unicode{x10333}unicode{x10349}[/math] [math]unicode{x10334}unicode{x1033D}unicode{x10332}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10339}unicode{x10343}unicode{x10337}[/math] [math]unicode{x1033E}unicode{x10337}unicode{x1033F}unicode{x10343}unicode{x10344}unicode{x10339}unicode{x10343}unicode{x10334}.[/math] [math]unicode{x10348}unicode{x10334}unicode{x10342}unicode{x10334}[/math] [math]unicode{x10338}unicode{x10334}unicode{x10342}unicode{x10334}unicode{x10343}[/math] [math]unicode{x10330}[/math] [math]unicode{x10345}unicode{x10339}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x1033B}[/math] [math]unicode{x10338}unicode{x10334}unicode{x10342}unicode{x10334}unicode{x10343}[/math] [math]unicode{x10330}[/math] [math]unicode{x10345}unicode{x10330}unicode{x1033E},[/math] [math]unicode{x10339}[/math] [math]unicode{x10332}unicode{x1033F}unicode{x10334}unicode{x10343}unicode{x10343},[/math] [math]unicode{x10331}unicode{x1033F}unicode{x10344}[/math] [math]unicode{x10339}unicode{x10344}[/math] [math]unicode{x10345}unicode{x10349}unicode{x1033F}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10333}[/math] [math]unicode{x10343}unicode{x10334}unicode{x10342}unicode{x10344}unicode{x10330}unicode{x10339}unicode{x1033D}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10339}[/math] [math]unicode{x1033D}unicode{x10349}unicode{x10344}[/math] [math]unicode{x10331}unicode{x10334}[/math] [math]unicode{x10347}unicode{x10339}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10333}unicode{x10343}[/math] [math]unicode{x10340}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10330}unicode{x1033E}.[/math] [math]unicode{x10334}unicode{x10345}unicode{x10334}unicode{x10342}unicode{x10339}[/math] [math]unicode{x10343}unicode{x10334}unicode{x1033D}unicode{x10344}unicode{x10334}unicode{x1033D}unicode{x10343}unicode{x10334}[/math] [math]unicode{x10345}unicode{x10349}unicode{x1033F}unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10333}[/math] [math]unicode{x10337}unicode{x10330}unicode{x10345}unicode{x10334}[/math] [math]unicode{x10343}unicode{x10349}unicode{x1033C}unicode{x10334}[/math] [math]unicode{x1033B}unicode{x10330}unicode{x1033A}unicode{x1033A}.[/math]

BYZANTINE-IRANIAN RELATIONS

In the realm of belles lettres exchanges seem to have been limited to romantic and didactic tales. […] The Alexander Romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes was also translated into Middle Persian and became well known in Islamic Persia (Southgate, introd.). […]

Rūm was the setting for the legendary adventures of many Iranian heroes. Goštāsp, patron of Zoroaster, for example, was said to have fled as a young prince to Rūm, where he met and married a daughter of the emperor, who bore him the paladin Esfandīār (Šāh-nāma, Moscow, VI, pp. 20ff.; Ṯaʿālebī, pp. 245-56; cf. Boyce, pp. 465f.). Šāpūr II was popularly believed to have traveled to Constantinople in disguise but to have been recognized and imprisoned; he escaped and de­feated Julian, forcing him to accept a humiliating peace treaty (this story, as incorporated in the Syriac Julian Romance, was repeated in Islamic sources: Nöldeke, 1874). A love story was woven around Šarvīn Daštābī, whom Yazdegerd I supposedly sent to Constantinople as tutor to Theodosius II (see above; Mīnovī, 1954, pp. 75-76).

The successor to Rage Against Quora that I don’t run:

• Bug? or Feature?

Best-ofs for language related answers:

• Conversance: A Language Blog
• Conversance: English

Good answers get stored up in many a blog; the most consistent of these is:

• Sophokagathia

For knowing what’s going on from Quora’s side in general, refer to the compilation in:

• Ed’s Harvest of Blogs by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency

I’m going to take a long time to say “none”.

Glottal stop – Wikipedia

The most common convention in Latin script is indeed to use apostrophe; and the disadvantage of the apostrophe is that it’s easy to miss, easy to conflate with a quotation mark, and it doesn’t look like a “real” letter. The same goes for patched apostrophes, such as the ʻOkina <ʻ> and the Modifier letter right half ring <ʾ>, or the spacing grave <`>. In fact, many writing systems end up making it optional. The status of the Hamza <ء> in Arabic script is also diacritic-y—by contrast with Hebrew, where aleph ⟨א⟩ is its own letter (when it’s not being a Mater lectionis).

Within Latin script, some alphabets have indeed plugged in distinct letters instead; from Wikipedia, Maltese and Võro use <q>, Malay uses <k>, and a few languages use <h>. That is not a universal solution though. Likewise, some Cyrillic alphabets use Palochka <Ӏ>, but in other alphabets that character is used as an ejective diacritic. (And yes, ejectives are also notated with apostrophes.)

The IPA symbol has begotten the Glottal stop (letter) <ʔ> with lowercase ⟨ɂ⟩ as a letter in Canadian indigenous languages. Wikipedia reports a 2015 case where women in the Northwest Territories demanded the right to use <ʔ> in their daughters’ names. (What’s in a Chipewyan name?) The Territory’s computers, of course, were Latin-1 only. <ʔ> often ends up rendered ad hoc as <?>, as you’d expect; and of course, that’s even worse than using an apostrophe, because everything treats it as punctuation.

ASCII Arabic (Arabic chat alphabet) renders the hamza as the lookalike <2>. Not a scalable solution either.

Voiced pharyngeal fricative – Wikipedia

This is a rarer sound cross-linguistically, but one that contrasts with the glottal stop in Arabic. In Chechen, it’s an allophone of the Palochka letter; in Avar it’s the digraph <гӏ>. Somali, as Joseph Boyle’s answer notes, uses <c>. Arabic has the Ayin <ع> for the phoneme, and in Hebrew it is also traditionally <ע>—although most Hebrew-speakers pronounced that now as a glottal stop.

ASCII Arabic renders the ayin as the lookalike <3>, which is just as bad as <2>. Arabic transliteration into Latin uses variants of apostrophes: <ʿ>, superscript <[math]^c[/math]>, <`>—with lots of ensuing confusion with the hamza; and of course, they are usually left out in transliterations anyway:

In loanwords, ʿayin is commonly omitted altogether: Iraq العراق al-ʿIrāq, Oman عمان ʿUmān, Saudi Arabia العربية السعودية al-ʿArabiyyah as-Saʿūdiyyah, Arab or Arabic عربي, ʿArabī, Amman عمان ʿAmmān, etc.

… Nope. No good options. It’s enough to make you give up and dump IPA symbols into your Romanisation—or the unchanged Arabic letters.

Aside from being a rhetorical question, it is also a Conventional Implicature: the primary meaning of the phrase is “this is obvious”, even though this is not the literal meaning of the phrase, and that meaning replies from Gricean maxims of conversation. (“What does ursine defecation have to do with my question as a counterquestion? Ah, it is a vividly expressed exemplar of something obvious…”)

(See Nick Nicholas’ answer to How is it possible that we perceive irony? for more on Conventional and Conversational Implicatures.)

The term got to be a conventional implicature, in turn, by virtue of being vivid language, which sticks as a mental image. In particular, it is an instance (literally) of scatology.

Between them, Christopher Ray Miller’s answer and Brian Collins’ answer have most of it covered. There’s one more way to look at it though.

French dropped /s/ at the start of consonant clusters, at the start and in the middle of words. So /sp/ > /p/, /sn/ > /n/, /st/ > /t/ etc: hospital > hôpital, Rhodanus > *Rhodne > *Rhosne > Rhône, establir > établir.

The motivation for this in phonotactics is to reduce the complexity of syllable structures, which make syllables easier to pronounce. It is linguistically common for /s/ to drop off at the start of clusters like that. Dennis Rhodes’ answer notices a similar process going on in some dialects of Spanish (Cuba, Puerto Rico): español ends up pronounced as etpañol, which is on the way to epañol. In my favourite language, Tsakonian, /s/ followed by a consonant is replaced by the aspirated consonant: stoma > tʰuma, sporos > pʰore.