Well, there was also a Thermodon river in Boeotia, mentioned by Herodotus (Thermodon – Brill Reference). So it was a real river name, both in Boeotia and in Asia Minor: Terme River.

This commentary on Lysias A Commentary on Lysias, Speeches 1-11 speculates that Therm-odon was picked as the location for the Amazons because Aristotle thought that women were cold and men hot, which would make warm women tomboys. The catch is, s/he goes on to say, Hippocrates thought menstrual blood was evidence that women were hot, and Lysias predated Aristotle.

Pseudo-Plutarch in De Fluviis gave a story for why the “Scythian” Thermodon was so called: Pseudo-Plutarch, De fluviis, XV. THERMODON. Annoyingly, the manuscript cuts out before we get to the story.

EDIT: Thank you Dimitra Triantafyllidou for prodding me in comments: https://www.quora.com/What-is-th…

From List of river name etymologies:

Danube: Latin Danuvius, Dacian: Donaris, from Iranian (Scythian or Sarmatian) dānu- ‘river’, of Indo-European origin.

So while the name translates into Greek as “hot tooth”, the word that looks like “tooth” is likely the Scythian for river.

That doesn’t account for the Boeotian river of the same name, of course…

In refutation of Jose Pineda:

• You need Old Ionic (Epic) to understand Homer, and all of Greek literature is suffused with Homer.
• You need Ionic for Herodotus and Hippocrates, and the authors imitating them (more of them for Hippocrates, for Herodotus just Lucian in one work).
• You need Doric for the choruses of the plays, as well as a lot of poets (not just Alcman of Sparta), and to know what’s going on in half of Aristophanes’ plays, where Doric-speakers show up.
• Aeolic you need for Sappho, Alcaeus, some poems in Theocritus—and to know how different Greek dialect can get.

Luckily, you don’t need to know much dialect for most things you’re likely to read in the canon—the Doric of the plays is quite superficial, and there’s not much variation in vocabulary.

But to go back to your original question details:

every time I look up a word in the dictionary, I find like seven versions of the same words in different dialects. Which one am I supposed to learn?

Liddell–Scott is an historical dictionary, so it tends to give Epic first, as the oldest form. If you’re learning ancient Greek, the form you learn out of the options given to you in an Ancient Greek dictionary is the Attic one: it is the dialect of most of the canon.

But you should be aware of the derivation of the form—particularly the uncontracted forms—so that the Attic form makes more sense in context. And being aware of the Epic form is no waste of time.

Not a hypothetical for me, nor it seems for most respondents.

I found AUD 300 bundled with a rubber band under my car tire, twenty years ago. I did not know then, and my wife has kindly informed me since, that the location and presentation of the $300 is consistent with a drug deal.

No, that does not mean my wife has personal experience of drug deals.

I do believe I have some pictorial evidence of the event:

What I not-so-hypothetically did, that rainy dark Melbourne night:

• Looked left
• Looked right
• Look left again
• Pocketed the bundle
• Drove off
• Went a rather circuitous path through the back streets of Clayton, Victoria
• Parked
• Counted the money
• Went home
• Invested the money into my doctoral dissertation: I paid my polyglot acquaintance N.K. to translate some pages from a Macedonian dictionary for me.

If the money was ever traced, I figured, better N.K. get nabbed than me.

OK, so I’ll burn in hell. Sounds like I’ll have good company.

That C (Τὸ Ϲίγμα τοῦτο) is called a lunate sigma (because it looks like a crescent). Per Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si…:

In handwritten Greek during the Hellenistic period (4th and 3rd centuries BC), the epigraphic form of Σ was simplified into a C-like shape. It is also found on coins from the fourth century BC onward. This became the universal standard form of sigma during late antiquity and the Middle Ages.

I wrote a little more on the lunate sigma in my site on Unicode Greek:

While in the 4th century BC literary papyri still used the ancient angular sigma (Thompson 1912:107), the cursive lunate form had taken over completely by the next century, where it stayed as the unique form of the sigma until the invention of lowercase in the 8th century—and as the capital sigma, for a millenium longer. […]

While the lunate was banished as a capital letter in the 18th century, it remains familiar to Modern Greeks through ecclesiastical use: it figures in church icons, and in decorative fonts intended to evoke Byzantium.

Btw, no reason to think it was under Roman influence. Not that early.

Jimmy Liu has been banned: Why was Jimmy Liu (who changed his name to Jay Liu) banned? Is this because of name change? What do you think about it?

Among the responses to Do you think that Quora should have a method to protest a ban? is Kang-Lin Cheng’s:

If you want to “protest” the ban, the best thing any of us can do is to leave this site forever. A lot of people who had respect for Quora, if they live up to their word about how angry they are at Jimmy Liu’s ban, should do so if that’s what they believe.

I’m not leaving Quora quite yet. But following the precedent established in #RunOverPedestriansGate (Srikar Vallabhaneni’s answer to What are some of the most controversial answers ever written on Quora?), I am taking a two-week break from posting.

As so many did at the time: The Emperor Has No Clothes by Rass Bariaw on Rage against Quora.

It’s Quora’s rules, it’s Quora’s site. We have no stake in the company, and we have no real influence over its decision-making. (Posting to Rage against Quora is of dubious value, but I have submitted at least a post there.)

The only value we contribute to Quora the company (as opposed to Quora the Tribe, h/t I’m taking a voluntary break from Quora while I reassess my future here by Scott Welch) is our participation in Quora. Which we can chose to withhold.

Even if it’s meaningless to, even if it’s just a symbolic gesture. Per Lyonel Perabo’s answer:

He was banned because Quora is a private venture and in exchange for using it for free, we have to agree on and realize that we don’t have a say about the way the network works. […] We’re just non-paying users. Some of us have the ability to possibly bring some money to the company because of our content being featured on the platform, but that doesn’t mean that we get to have a piece of the pie. It’s a social network in a capitalistic system, that’s the way it works.

Going on a two week strike is a symbolic gesture I can live with. I don’t know that it will make a difference. It likely won’t. But I need to be able to look myself in the mirror. One of my tribe has been picked off, with no stated rationale, and a guessed-at rationale that I think is trumped.

I cannot not stand by and say it’s fine.

Quora does have a method to protest editorial action. Though its efficacy is open to question:

On strike in support of Jay Liu by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile

Ah, a soon-to-be 100+ answers question that Quora would block as a poll question, but should not because it is community building.

Reflexes.

When I was in high school, I went to the Victoria-wide tryouts for the student version of the Sale of the Century game show. I do believe I can find some pictorial material relating to this…

… Ah yes. The first flush of youth.

The first stage of the tryouts was a written test.

I got the top score in the room.

The second stage involved hitting a buzzer if you knew the answer to a question.

I was out first round.

Remembering events.

I’m great at remembering facts. Outstanding. Positively freaky. The human encyclopaedia.

Things that happened? I think the most frequent phrase I use to my wife is “I don’t remember.”

Which is a downer when she’s trying to reminisce with me about anything.

—Remember when we went to that lovely restaurant in the hills?

—I don’t remember.

—And when we were listening to Kenny G in the car park?

—I don’t remember.

—So what are we doing for our anniversary?

—I don’t remember.

—What do you remember?

—I don’t remember.

Visual Arts.

I know, it’s hard to believe given the quality of my pictorial contributions to Quora.

But astonishingly, I don’t get the visual arts. Poetry and music are where I’ve always been paying attention.

Not a song I know, but Googling gets me:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_ZaezBmA5nk

Πάρε φωτιά και κάψε με: Take Fire and Burn me, 1953. Lyrics: Kostas Manesis; Music: Yannis Papaioannou. Performer: Stelios Kazantzidis. stixoi.info: Πάρε φωτιά και κάψε με

Take fire and burn me, take your sweet revenge.
The way you’ve left me, best that I be ash.

I don’t want my life,
my soul loathes you.

Take knife and kill me, cut me into pieces,
so I need see no more your cunning eyes.

Make with your hands a noose, and squeeze my throat,
choke me so I’ll be free of my deep sorrow.

It’s a great song, thanks for introducing me to it. The lyrics are melodramatic, sure, but it’s got that classic, 50s perfection of laika, and is agreeably βαρύ. (“Ηeavy” literally; stern?)

If you take the definition of acronym as using the first one or more letters of the word, Russian does them a lot, and has done since Soviet times: Gazprom = Gazovaya promyshlennost, gas industry. German does them as well: Kripo = Kriminal-polizei. These syllabic acronyms (or syllabic abbreviations) were particular favourites of totalitarian regimes. From the Wikipedia article, I see Hebrew does them as well.

If you use non-initial syllables of a word, it becomes a Portmanteau. Portmanteaux don’t get used as abbreviations in English, but the Wikipedia article lists Indonesian for portmanteau acronyms. None of the other languages listed use portmanteaux in the same way.

Originally Answered:

Why do Greek, Latin, French, German, Russian etc. have masculine and feminine gender for inanimate objects?

The history of Indo-European gender, like the history of any language feature, is messy. The mainstream theory is that the feminine, in fact, was originally not animate at all, but came from the abstract and collective suffix *-h₂. You may be more familiar with the Greek form of that suffix: -(i)a.

Why does gender not align nicely with animacy, let alone sex? Because of analogy, and cognitive patterning: making up classes of things, and then lumping everything in the world into one of them, by family resemblance. The mechanism for this lumping is Conceptual metaphor.

We see this more obviously in non-Indo-European languages, which have a lot more “genders”. (In fact, by the time you get to a dozen of them, there’s no point calling them genders, and we call them noun classes instead.)

The pioneering work on the kinds of cognitive categories underlying noun classes is George Lakoff’s. His acknowledged classic takes its title from the membership of one of the noun classes of Dyirbal language, an Australian Aboriginal language.

The noun classes of Dyirbal are:

• I – most animate objects, men
• II – women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals
• III – edible fruit and vegetables
• IV – miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)

Lakoff’s classic was thus titled: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

Mind blown, Dimitra (who A2A’d)?

Greeks’ minds will be blown be the fact that πῦρ, γυνή, καὶ θάλασσα, “fire, woman, and the sea”, have been lumped together in an Ancient Greek maxim. (It has been attributed to Aesop: Πῦρ γυνὴ καὶ θάλασσα, δυνατὰ τρία, “Fire woman and the sea, these are the three strong things.” And Menander: Θάλασσα καὶ πῦρ καὶ γυνὴ τρίτον κακόν “Sea and fire, and woman is the third evil.”)

My mind is blown (though it shouldn’t be) by the fact that Lakoff had no idea about the Greek maxim when he wrote the book.