You lose linguistic diversity, as the dialects gradually die out, or at least are marginalised. You may not may not care about linguistic diversity, of course.

You lose ways of saying things that are specific to non-standard dialects. Cretan dialect for example has a distinct word for “trickle”. (To my annoyance, I don’t remember it.) Standard Greek only has “run”, a verb which applies equally to dripping, trickling, and leaking. Pontic Greek works on animacy, not gender. Tsakonian has some very archaic usage of the participle, which end up sounding closer to English than Modern Greek (he started barking αρχίνιε κχαούντα; I am seeing έννι ορού).

You lose the cultural associations that the dialects expressed; you sacrifice the distinct cultures conveyed by the dialects in favour of the standard.

If your language is moribund and there are still native speakers, standardising languages turns out not to be a good idea. Oh sure, you have limited resources to promulgate the language, and they’re more efficiently expended through using only one standard form. But when the standard form is not what the native speakers of the language actually speak, all you’ve ended up doing is alienating those speakers from the media you use. That’s what happened with Gaelic for example: the remaining speakers out in the Hebrides felt even worse about the language they spoke, because it didn’t match what BBC Alba was broadcasting.

If the standard is not anyone’s native dialect, you’re going to have some disruption while people learn the new standard, and get used to it. In fact, if the standard is not preexisting, you’re going to have some disruption while people flesh it out and elaborate it. And they may do a bad job of it.

If the standard is someone’s native dialect, you’re going to have enduring resentment from speakers of the dialects which have missed out.

If you’re a subject matter expert, you know which topics to remove.

If you’re not, you could (a) report the question, and hope that QCR will work out what’s wrong, act as subject matter experts themselves, and pick the right subset of questions, with the longstanding level of expertise and discretion we have come to expect…

… no, stop laughing, Steven…

… no, seriously…

or (b) I dunno, find a subject matter who can.

Robert Frost complained about something quite similar recently, in light of Quora’s decision to do away with complex reporting: What do we do about wrong answers? by Robert Frost on Rage against Quora

Thing about onomatopoeias is, they get conventionalised and stick around, even if the referent no longer makes that sound.

I mean this sound?

This sound, the doot doot doot bloop bleep flurgh frump virrrr of a dial up modem? Hasn’t been heard in functional use for what, twenty years? And yet it is still used here and there, as emblematic of the internets.

I submit to you, learned Quorans, that there is an onomatopoeia for computers lurking around, but it dates from the 60s and 70s.

And that the onomatopoeia is bleep or bloop bleep.

They won’t be teenagers for much longer, but I was blown away to find out the age of all of the following:

Dimitris Almyrantis

Lara Novakov

Sierra Spaulding

I am dismayed at many of the answers here.

I am 45. I was never more intelligent, more vital, more curious, more positive, more engaged, than when I was…

… actually, than when I was 25. But I was still pretty damn impressive at 18. And I read a hell of a lot more literature.

It’s true, as the renowned party poopers on this thread have put it, that your brain development is still ongoing at 18; as Kazantzakis would put it in Greek, your brain “has not yet congealed.” But that’s nothing to do with intellect; that’s to do with impulse control, and experience. The only thing that I grew in mentally since 18 was reserve.

Or selling out, as my youthful self would put it. And it wouldn’t necessarily be unfair.

Two of my favourite Quorans were my favourites before I had any idea of their age: Lara Novakov and Dimitris Almyrantis. The only reason I’m not adding Sierra Spaulding to that list is because I don’t care as much about US electoral politics as she and Michael Masiello do, so I haven’t followed her as closely as he has. (I’m looking forward to what she says on Quora past November 🙂

All of them have occasionally (very occasionally) said things to make me wince (just as any number of 60-year olds here have); but none of them have said anything to make me not take them seriously. And the same goes for any number of other teens I may have bumped into here, realising it or not.

Are they outliers, as party poopers here have harrumphed? Sure.

But aren’t we all?

P.J. O’Rourke was in town recently. He was explaining Trump and the resentment of the elites to us Antipodeans, in an ABC chat show (Q&A). And he pointed out that everyone in the audience was by definition in the resented elite, simply because they were interested in politics.

These are people posting, intelligently and vibrantly, about Ottoman history and Serbian daily life and American politics, on a forum defined by its braininess. On a forum that by definition counts as the resented elite. They’ve earned the respect I give them.

Originally Answered:

Why has Quora moderation removed my question?

Like Konstantinos Konstantinides said, if we don’t know what the question was, we can’t help.

But the right place to get help is likely:

Need help wording a Quora question?

There’s a slight factor, which Chris Lo has already pointed out in comments, but it’s only slight.

Spanish does not have length contrast in vowels or consonants. As a result it is syllable-timed, and it is spoken quite fast.

Italian has audible vowel length differences (stresses vs unstressed), and also long and short consonants. That makes it spoken a bit slower, and there’s more phonetic variety, which (for me) makes it a bit easier to pick out words.

The closest we have that I know of (and it’s really not very close at all) are the Pseudo-Dosithean Hermeneumata. They’re a third century AD Berlitz phrasebook of Greek and Latin. Nothing about language teaching methodology, and of course not much of a language teaching methodology is on display anyway.

I did find the following exchange in the Berlitz funny though:

bibliotheca Augustana

Colloquium Harleianum:

23. Isn’t that Lucius who’s got my silver coins? Here he is. Then I’ll go and say hello to him. Hail, householder! Am I still not going to get back what you’ve owed me for so long? What are you talking about? You’re crazy. I lent you silver, and you call me crazy? You thief, don’t you know who I am? Why don’t you go look for whoever you made a loan to; I don’t owe you anything. You swear that to me. I’ll swear wherever you want me to; let’s go. Swear in the temple. By the God over here, you did not lend me a thing. Well, fair enough; it’s no good to doubt the word of a free man and householder.

24. And this animal-fighter is making fun of me? Let me go, and I’ll smash his teeth in. Yeah, well I’ll poke your eyes out. I can see what you would do to me. I’ll have you sent to jail, where you deserve to grow old. You’re making fun of me, you prison-guard. I don’t care what you do. You have a friend, and you’ll find one in me. Well said. OK, I forgive you.

… I dunno, maybe the Romans were onto something with their language teaching.

Supplemental to the list given by David Rosson (ah, your American bias is showing, David 🙂

cc C (Selva) R.Selvakumar

• As Dmitriy Genzel points out, Historical Linguistics is an observational science, like Astronomy. A lot of hypothesis testing though.
• To add to Tibor Kiss’ list of German words, Linguistic Typology is a Versammelnde Wissenschaft: a science based on data collection. Like biological taxonomy.
• Semantics, depending on the flavour of Semantics being done, is an observational science (lexicography), or logic, or philosophy.
• Pragmatics is something in between cultural anthropology and philosophy (but a very cool, nuts-and-bolts philosophy).
• Discourse Analysis is observational science, but with dirtier data.

Oh, and phoneticians’ papers look just like psychology papers. Four pages long, with graphs. Historical linguists’ papers are old-school chatty. Syntax papers have at least some pretence of rigour. The style of the papers lines up to the kinds of science (or Geistwissenschaft) their subdisciplines aspire to be.

Patrick Ehlert’s answer to What determines whether a Quora topic has a “Most viewed writers” statistic associated with it?

As Patrick Ehlert has pointed out, some very popular topics are blocked from having MVW:

• How Much Does X Cost? (2.1K questions, 2.5K followers)
• Survey Question (253.5K questions, 28.4K followers)
• Quora Community (29.7K questions, 10.9K followers)
• Best of X (58.6K questions, 112.2K followers)

I remember seeing somewhere that “adult” topics don’t have MVW lists either. Nothing in Pornography or Porn Stars, for instance.