Category: Uncategorized

You’ve got a variety of responses here.

If Obvious Troll Is Trolling, your answer is not going to educate them, the question is likely going to be deleted anyway, and your answer will become inaccessible unless you archive it off to a blog. As many have said, Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer most succinctly.

If you write a good answer anyway, i.e. answer it appropriately: don’t do it for the OP, as Tong Hui Kang’s answer argues. Do it to spread good information. And do it if you think it is really important to spread that information, because the risk that the question is going to be deleted anyway is pretty strong.

Don’t do it to give a withering witty reply back. Not unless it’s Oscar Wilde God Level funny. Countersnark gets boring quickly.

Don’t do it to virtue signal. I don’t care if the term has been appropriated by the Cultural Right, it points to a real phenomenon, there’s way too much of it on Quora, and it is boring. And not particularly informative.

Don’t do it to flame them right back to oblivion. The way BNBR works, you’ll be the one ending up in oblivion.

And lastly and most difficult of all: Do not assume by default that everyone who disagrees with your worldview is an Obvious Troll Trolling. Stating that assumption in an answer is, in fact, a BNBR offence. (I’m sure Jennifer Edeburn has the reference for that somewhere.) Hanlon’s razor applies to Quora questions, just as it does to Quora UX.

Lara Novakov and Konstantinos Konstantinides are both right.

The dialects of the Ionian islands have had the longest exposure to Italian (from 1200 through to 1800), and has substantial Italian vocabulary. This performance of Petegola from Corfu (Mardi Gras skits) may exaggerate the intonation as vaudeville, but exaggerated vaudeville is probably the closest you’re going to get nowadays to dialect intonation; and it sounds a little Italian to me:

Why yes, petegola is Venetian, for ‘gossip’.

Of course, nothing sounds more Italian than the Greek actually spoken in Salento and Calabria: it really is Greek as rendered by the Mario Bros.

I have been A2A’d this by Alexander Lee, because I posted Nick Nicholas’ answer to Would you post a recording of yourself reciting Sophie Dockx’s Eulogia Hiphopia in Latin?

… let that be my answer to this too. 😛

Pidgins have limited vocabularies, because they are by their nature sparse languages, and pidgins sound like colonial language babytalk, because paternalism. And some of the more amusing Pidgin coinages, we can be reasonably sure, are the colonials poking fun at the natives yet again, rather than genuinely used circumlocutions.

Such as, for example, the notorious pseudo-Bislama expression for a piano (Vanuatu: Important Phrases):

Wan bigfala blak bokis hemi gat waet tut mo hemi gat blak tut, sipos yu kilim smol, hemi singaot gud.

Literally; One big fella black box, him he got white tooth and (or more/in addition to) him he got black tooth, suppose you kill him small (strike or hit lightly) him he sing out good.

Yeah… no, as we would say in Australia.

There’s also the obfuscations about obfuscation itself:

Urban Dictionary: Eschew Obfuscation, Espouse Elucidation

“Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the circumscriptional appelations are excised.” (William Mann & Sandra Thompson, Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation, 1987.)

As a surname, Rawnie turns up very rarely in Lanarkshire, Scotland (http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-b…).

As a first name, Rawnie is indeed English Romani, from the Romani rani for ‘lady’ (Message: “Re: Romani names”); it corresponds e.g. to Hungarian Romani Aranya (https://books.google.com.au/book…)

MacKenzie is an Anglicisation (with garbled yogh) of MacCoinnich = Son of Kenneth: Mackenzie (surname) – Wikipedia.

It’s inserting Justine Damond’s name into the protest chant “If we don’t get it [justice], shut it down”, which has become associated with Black Lives Matter among others, and which also turns up as the hashtag #shutitdown:

Justice: If We Don’t Get It, Shut It Down! (with images, tweets) · krissmissed

If We Don’t Get It, Shut It Down

Chanting Hashtags and Hashtagging Chants – The Civic Beat – Medium

“If we don’t get it, shut it down” has been a common chant at rallies—in other words, “If we don’t get justice, shut down the system.” The chant you hear in this video also includes the names of individuals who have died. At protest events, the names of those who passed are often transformed into hashtags, like #MikeBrown and #EricGarner.

Frisk’s etymological dictionary concurs with Frank Dauenhauer’s answer, that the bustard was called ōtis ‘one with ears’ (“from its cheek tufts or head? See Thompson, Birds”); thus also ōtos ‘scops owl’, from its ear tufts.

If you go to A glossary of Greek birds : Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 1860-1948 Sir, p. 200, you’ll find he says the etymology is doubtful, as well as whether the bird is the Great bustard (Otis tarda) or the Houbara bustard. But I don’t see what else it would be.

Your insight is correct, Riccardo: declensions and genders are both classes of nominals. The difference in Indo-European is that gender, not declension, is what governs the agreement of non-nouns with nouns, while declension is how the morphology of nouns themselves works.

So in Ancient Greek, gender only affects the ending of the noun in patches—a couple of cases differ by gender in each declension. But a third declension noun will agree in gender with a 1st/2nd declension adjective or pronoun, without any problem.

You wouldn’t design things like that; it’s kind of a happenstance. Gender is slightly (only slightly) more predictable than an arbitrary declension, which makes it a better candidate for agreement. But it’s an accident of how Indo-European developed. And recall that the feminine is a late development in Indo-European anyway, originating in a collective suffix.

Many languages outside Indo-European have noun classes, and the term “noun classes” is used precisely because in those languages, there is not much of a distinction between declension and gender to be made. Swahili has 18 noun classes; that number sounds more like a declension count than a gender count, but there is a strong semantic component to them (as there is in noun classes in general), and animacy takes over as a factor in agreement anyway.

Articulatory phonetics was indeed done before Palatography. And not just by the Ottomans: the Korean script Hangul originated in articulatory phonetics, and for that matter both the Sanskrit grammarians and the later Graeco-Roman grammarians had pretty much had it figured out.

And they could just as my students in first year were able to learn phonetics from me, by watching my mouth and thinking about their tongue positioning. Yes, we used diagrams like that too, but people do know what the roof of their mouth is, or their hard palate, or that bumpy thing just behind their teeth; they know when they are rounding their lips, and when their tongue moves to the front or back of their mouth. For the phonemically distinct places and manners of articulation of any language—just half a dozen each—you don’t need any more detail in location than what you can introspect by being aware of what your mouth muscles are doing.

Phonetic detail needs more than that. And phonetic detail is the domain of the palatograph and the spectrogram.

Maybe Protagoras’ “Man is the measure of all things” (πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἄνθρωπος)?

He also is believed to have created a major controversy during ancient times through his statement that, “Man is the measure of all things”, interpreted by Plato to mean that there is no absolute truth, but that which individuals deem to be the truth. Although there is reason to question the extent of the interpretation of his arguments that has followed, that concept of individual relativity was revolutionary for the time, and contrasted with other philosophical doctrines that claimed the universe was based on something objective, outside of human influence or perceptions.