Category: Uncategorized

Context: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why are opinions from teenagers often not taken seriously on Quora?

What would happen if forty-five-year olds like me took over Quora?

You’d get some geniuses like me, and some dumbasses like, oh, I dunno, whoever your least favourite middle-aged Quoran is.

Ditto teenagers. There’s plenty of dumb answers from the middle-aged, and plenty of genius answers from teenagers.

OK, there would be more dumb questions and dumb answers and herp derp nonsense attempted on Quora. Not because teenagers are dumber than the middle-aged, but because they lack the impulse control. I’ll concede that.

So the proportions would be different, and would need even more policing. Which, regrettably, would probably end up meaning even more QuoraBots let loose to chop people’s heads of. But it would be a matter of scale, not an absolute difference.

Good question, Anon!

By design, they’re not supposed to. Linguistics makes a point of segregating them hierarchically:

• Phonetics: how individual sounds work
• Phonology: how sounds are organised into meaningful contrasts as phonemes
• Morphology: how phonemes are organised into meaningful components of words as morphemes
• Lexicon: how morphemes are organised into meaningful words
• Semantics: how the meaning of those words works.

The hierarchies are more leaky than we would like; they are convenient abstractions. There can be leakage between them. But by asking for semantics to meet phonetics, OP, you’re asking for an awful lot of leakage.

The closest I can think of is morphophonemes, which leak between phonology and morphology. Plural -s, for example covers both [s] and [z]. The two are clearly different phonemes of English now (though they didn’t used to be). You could argue that the neutralisation of contrast between the two in that context means that there is a single morphophoneme at work, -S, spanning /s/ and /z/. Enough of that kind of thing happens, through diachronic leakage, that Morphophonology is a thing.

That’s a bridge between morphology and phonology, anyway.

EDIT: Forgot to put in another leak: Sound symbolism. Phonemes are associated with particular vague vibes of meaning, and accordingly get used with naming particular concepts. It’s vague, it’s infrequent, it’s not reproducible (little sounds little, but does small?), and linguists usually get away with ignoring it outside the most explicit instances, in onomatopoeia. But it is a leak of some meaning from semantic classes down to phonetics.

This is more about others’ questions I find than my own, though I occasionally get dinged by the FormatBot myself.

• Always end the question with a question mark. No, don’t follow it with a parenthetical remark
• Correct Spelling
• Correct Punctuation
• Correct Spacing
• Boring Punctuation. The FormatBot is a simple beast. Don’t do anything creative with punctuation. If you’re going to cite words or letters, for example, don’t use quotes. Just italicise them.
• If all those fail, I dunno, keep rephrasing it until it stops. And make the rephrasings progressively dumber and dumber until it does. The more cookie-cutter the syntax and punctuation, the less the FormatBot will find to object to.

I don’t actually hate the FormatBot anywhere near as much as the other bots roaming around here. In this particular context, it does less harm than good: simpler questions are less likely to be Special Snowflake questions.

Commonalities between Greek and Arabic?

They belong to different language families—Indo-European vs Afro-Asiatic (which includes the Semitic languages, which also includes Hebrew and Phoenecian); noone has proven a more distant relation between the two.

The alphabet of both derives from Phoenecian; hence the similarity in letter names to this day. That also extends to Hebrew: aleph, alif, alfa.

A few loanwords from Phoenecian in Ancient Greek; like arrabon “pledge” (and later, engagement).

A few more loanwords from Hebrew into Koine, through Christianity, like satanas and amen.

A fair few loanwords from Greek into Arabic, via the transmission of the Classics and Greek science and mathematics.

A few loanwords from Arabic into Greek via contact during Byzantium. (e.g. magazi “shop”, maimu “monkey”).

A fair few loanwords from Arabic into Greek via Ottoman Turkish. e.g. musafiris < mısafır < mosâfer “guest”.

Pretty sure me “with” isn’t one of them. OTOH, me Albanian and Modern Greek are considered cognates.

Permit me, Quorans, to introduce an Antipodean personality into this thread of woe.

Permit me also to try and comprehend why we have this annoyance for no (or least no rational) reason.

I mean, if you’re not from Australia, this chap looks unexceptional, doesn’t he?

Raffishly unkempt, perhaps. Glasses; he could be studious! A computer in the background: might he be in IT? On a mobile phone: must be always on the go. Looks to be in his fifties: surely not an age bracket anyone can take offence to.

OK. Australians, don’t say anything. That’s my job, it’s my answer.

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So. Let me pitch you a story.

A young carpenter by the name of S. Caminetti, travelling the country, from sheep station to dockland, settles down in his native Sydney, marries and establishes a successful building business. It is the Australian property boom, and business is good.

He is affable and charming, with all those virtues Australians appreciate in their tradespeople—those they call sparkies (electricians) and chippies (carpenters) and brickies (bricklayers) and dunny divers (plumbers). And somehow, ten years into his successful building business, he ends up doing building segments, during a lifestyle show on Australian TV.

He’s a hit. The public loves him. He gets a series of TV shows that rotate around building and renovations (now an Australian craze). He gets sponsorships from sundry building-related enterprises. He refuses to let his unlikely fame get to him: in fact, he famously makes a bottle opener out of his Logie Award (the Australian counterpart to the Emmy).

Why on earth, Nick Nicholas, you horrible heartless inner-city effete snob, would you despise such a man? Why would you put your hands over your ears and demand that S. Caminetti vacate your sight, whenever you flick past a show with his whimsical stylings?

Mm?

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Perhaps these images can begin to convey why:

Scott Fricking Cam. Take your blokey bloke hijinks, Scott Cam, and your shit-eating grin, and your bogan tradie antics, and your endless succession of Ocker reno reality shows that all look the same, and your one-man bolstering up of an entire TV network, and your smug condescension, and your banter with your irritating reno reality show contestants, and have I mentioned that god. damn. shit. eating. grin; and get out of my sight.

NOW!

Fuck me. As if I didn’t have enough reasons to hate Sydney already.

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EDIT: I realise, in the torrent of my rage, that I forgot to explain why we hate these people.

As you can see from the images: it’s the overexposure. And the bombardment of media telling you you must. love. this. person.

No, pilgrim. No I must not.

Reporting in.

No longer an academic, but I have a PhD in historical linguistics, and I published over a decade. Mostly in Greek historical linguistics. I also do some computational linguistics, although I’m not sure that’s counted here.

The question Assuming age, distance, and current relationship status weren’t an issue, who are some Quora users you could see yourself dating? turned into quite the love-in.

You may be helped to make sense of this by such postings as:

Robert Todd’s answer to Assuming age, distance, and current relationship status weren’t an issue, who are some Quora users you could see yourself dating?

Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer to Assuming age, distance, and current relationship status weren’t an issue, who are some Quora users you could see yourself dating?

… But really, you might as well dive into:

https://www.quora.com/Assuming-a…

Robert Todd, Michael Masiello, Dimitris Almyrantis, Lara Novakov: symposium at Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s!

I think it puts me in a strange uncomfortable place.

On the one hand, I am a libertarian in many things; I am more libertarian, certainly, than my fellow Australian latte-sippers (as opposed to American latte-sippers). And my position is that Bernardi’s dilution is right: there is a difference of threshold between “intimidate, humiliate, vilify” and “offend and insult”, and that threshold does have a chilling effect.

On the other hand, I’m a moderately Libertarian Leftist; not a liberal or a Randian Libertarian. I loathe all proponents of the dilution of 18C, with the exception of Leyonhjelm, who may be a nutjob, but is at least a principled nutjob. My blood boils whenever Andrew Fricking Bolt is mentioned in any context; and “white-skinned Aboriginals” or “Ban the burka” is not the kind of discourse I find worth defending. Bernardi is our very own Ted Cruz. The Dad’s Army backbench supporting this is who’s holding Turnbull—and in many ways, our country—back from joining the 21st century.

InB4 David Stewart…

It’s not like Quora makes it possible to recover your most upvoted (and hence overrated) Quora answers. I can see that my most upvoted, by a factor of 5, were

• Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why was Richard White banned from Quora?
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why was Jimmy Liu (who changed his name to Jay Liu) banned? Is this because of name change? What do you think about it?

I am proud of those answers. But I don’t think I’m 5 times more proud of those answers, than I am of the questions where I try to work out a historical linguistic puzzle from first principles…

An unfortunate number of coincidences. The coincidences all ended up converging in Sans Serif Latin script, because a vertical line is a simple thing, and any simplification of glyphs can’t get any simpler than a | .

The letter I started as Phoenecian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodh, which did not look like a |:

But by the time the Greeks were done with it, it did (from: Archaic Greek alphabets):

There was no number 1 or lowercase l back then to cause trouble.

The number 1 actually went a curious journey from Indian to Arabic to European numbers, as summarised in 1 (number):

So: ⼀ to १ to ۱ to 1.

Simplify the Devanagari or Roman serifed glyph, and you get the Arabic and Roman sans serif glyph: a vertical line. The vertical line ended up ambiguous in Arabic with alef, too: ا ۱.

The lowercase l did in fact emerge out of capital L, by shortening the bottom of the L in Rustic capitals. As you can see (source: History of the Latin alphabet), the history of <I> and <l> has been an attempt to fix the resulting ambiguity, including different sizing, serifs, and tittles. The distinction between capitals and lowercase was more pronounced in mediaeval script than after the invention of printing, so I/l wasn’t as much of a problem back then.