Do Greeks have more in common with the Turks than they do with the French or Germans?

For much of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, Greek identity was a tug of war between a Romaic and a Hellenic construct, between an identification with Ancient Greece via Western Europe (or vice versa), and the folk culture informed by the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.

The Hellenes have won, but that victory is fairly recent. I don’t believe it truly predates the European Union. And that victory has certainly not been as thorough-going as people like to think.

Turks have been the Other for Greeks too long for them to identify with the Turks. Especially when Greeks have so much invested in identifying as European.

All I can say is, there is a joy of recognition when I talk to Turks, that I don’t feel talking to Germans. That’s not just because of the commonalities in low rather than high culture. It’s also because those commonalities have been deprecated in official discourse. They have not been ignored, but they have been cast as something to be embarrassed about. So when I do encounter those commonalities, they are all the more resonant for me.

Is it possible to shorten the ordinal numbers in modern Greek?

The traditional way of doing that is to use a Greek numeral; you could use them indiscriminately for ordinals, cardinals, and in antiquity even multiplicatives. So World War II, Henry VIII: Βʹ Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Ηʹ, which are in fact read out loud as Δεύτερος Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Όγδοος, with ordinals and not cardinals. (It is “Second World War”, never “World War Two”.) This is done for names and titles.

The ordinal numbers can have a superscript inflection ending, as is done in Romance languages. That does not happen with titles, but it is optional with non-titles: you can say α[math]^{ος}[/math], β[math]^{ος}[/math], γ[math]^{ος}[/math] πρωταθλητής for 1st, 2nd, 3rd champion. Alternatively, the suffix can be hyphenated: α-ος.

These days, you will also see Arabic rather than Greek numerals, always with the inflection, and the inflection can appear with no hyphen or superscript: 1[math]^{ος}[/math], 1ος. This is newer, and if Google is any indication, that’s the most common mechanism now. In the 80s, my primary school, Sitia Second, was named Βʹ Δημοτικό Σητείας (primary schools and high schools are numbered in each town); its blog now names it 2o ΔΗΜΟΤΙΚΟ ΣΧΟΛΕΙΟ ΣΗΤΕΙΑΣ. Patras Third High School, which is old and venerable, is listed on Wikipedia as Γ’ Γυμνάσιο Πατρών; but its Facebook page names it as 3ο ΓΥΜΝΑΣΙΟ ΠΑΤΡΩΝ.

What are the most romantic restaurants in Melbourne?

We truly are spoiled for choice in this town, Miguel Paraz.

I did take my future wife for Valentine’s Day to Grossi Florentino our first year of dating. It truly is a high temple of dining. It would have to be, at $200 a person.

But the place that pops into my head is Scugnizzo. Tucked away in a laneway of the more downmarket side of the CBD, in a lovely old brick warehouse, with a courtyard. Featuring an expansive mad genius Italian chef with creativity to spare, and good ingredients. It’s a place that makes you smile just to walk in. And I think it is well suited to canoodling…

What obstacles will I run into transitioning from Attic to Koine Greek?

Like Michael Masiello said, no real obstacles: things are simpler. There will be fewer Attic futures and Attic second declensions. In fact, they were historically called Attic not because they were alien to Doric (Doric loved the “Attic” future), but because they were alien to Koine. So λαός, σκανδαλίσω, not λεώς, σκανδαλιῶ. Some Latin loan words, but you will recognise them from English anyway: κουστωδία, κεντυρίων. Some particles are moving towards Modern Greek, so their usage may surprise you: ἵνα for example is closer to a subjunctive marker then just a purposive.

I’d just jump in. If you find it too easy, I’ll point you in the direction of Nonnus’ Homeric paraphrase of the Gospel of John. 🙂

What is Quora doing to stop people from posting offers on Fiverr to write Quora answers for $5?

About as little as it is doing to stop it on Upwork, of which Quora is an enterprise client (they’re still recruiting question writers there):

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Is Quora just a site where shills ask questions anonymously so they can answer them and promote themselves and/or their companies?

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Has Quora ever hired people to ask questions on a particular topic?

And it looks like 50c an answer is the rate there too:

I’m looking for someone to search for questions about how to play/train on Baseball/Basketball/Golf/Swimming on Quora and to post answers related to the questions by referring to what a company’s online solutions can offer. A Quora account and sample of answers shall be provided. Pay Rate: 20 answers for $10. NOTE: You should be familiar with the sports as in how to play/train or coach a sport, not the spectator part of it (news, teams, views, etc). We’re looking for those that know the following sports.

50c?! Cf. John L. Miller’s answer to Will (and should) Quora ever pay its content creators?

If I give you a computer because I like giving people computers, that makes me happy. If I give you a computer because you’re paying me $50, I no longer have the joy of giving AND it is worth more to me than $50 (even if no one else will pay anything for it), so I’m losing money and unhappy.

50c… is not going to motivate me to do the kind of answer I do for free. FFS.

I read with some… puzzlement the following answer:

It’s a win win (x2) for all the parties involved.

A freelance writer gets money.

A company gets exposure.

Quora establishes itself as the go-to place for quality content.

Users get their answers from a professional and get to discover companies related to their interests. Maybe they can even get their problems solved.

Does that 50c an answer question sound like it’ll be quality content? Does it sound like anything but spam?

One would think, at any rate, that spam prevention would be better than spam cure. Then again, one would think that Quora would take a dimmer perspective on Do My Homework questions too.

Upwork is awash with people paying freelancers to do their homework, btw. Behold: the programmers of the future. And weep for the species…

Erica Friedman: What was the 2017 New York Top Writer’s meetup like?

Erica Friedman’s answer to What was the 2017 New York Top Writer’s meetup like?

I was able to get there a little early and meet some of the Quora Staff and speak with them. It’s very easy when one is removed from the gears of a community to imagine that nothing is being done when, in fact, a great deal is being done, just not all of it working the way we want. I came away from those talks excited and energized about the direction Quora is taking.

What is the word on Wonder woman’s shield?

Wonder Woman’s Shield says that the quote OP gives is on the shield. However, The Badass Quote That’s Engraved On Wonder Woman’s Sword says that it is on her sword:

In the “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Tech Manual” (via Digital Spy), it’s revealed that director Zack Snyder wanted inscriptions on the sword and shield. After coming up with a “hybrid extinct language,” the team inscribed the sword with a quote from Joseph Campbell’s collection “Goddess: Mystery of the Feminine Divine.” Here’s the quote translated into English:

“Life is killing all the time and so the goddess kills herself in the sacrifice of her own animal.”

What is Written on Wonder Woman’s Shield in BATMAN V SUPERMAN? | Nerdist links to a transliteration of the inscription on the sword (it says shield, but the closeup of the sword has the same text), done by Vince Tomasso: The “Greek” on Wonder Woman’s Equipment in ‘Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice’

The Greek makes no sense, and it has random digammas and a letter that Tomasso did not recognise, and that I’m proud that I did: Sampi (in its arrow variant). It looks like they made up the language for the quote, and I would not be surprised if they just made up a bunch of random letters, rather than a fully-fledged language. But Greek it isn’t. The archaic letters do indicate this is supposed to be some sort of fictional pre-Greek…

Why are unicode characters outside the BMP called astral?

Thank you for the A2A, Jelle Zijlstra, and why do I suspect that you’ve read my page Astral Planes?

There’s 17 * 65536 characters in Unicode. Each 65536 characters is called a Plane. The first plane, the BMP, is the plane that most characters you will ever encounter are in. Only two other planes are used (or indeed likely to be used), and they contain obsolete, archaic scripts or characters in scripts that won’t get used much at all, and that most people will rarely encounter.

Or, per Plane (Unicode) – Wikipedia

In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (= [math]2^{16}[/math]) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16 decimal, which corresponds with the possible values 00–10 hexadecimal of the first two positions in six position format (hhhhhh). Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which contains most commonly-used characters. The higher planes 1 through 16 are called “supplementary planes”, or humorously “astral planes“.

Thank you Wikipedia.

[citation needed]

Actually, you know what? I’ll cite me. Astral Planes

So as of Unicode 3.0.1 (August 2000), Unicode is organised into 16 planes, each of 64K; this gives over a million codepoints, which should be enough for all needs, past present and future. The Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), or Plane 0, is the first 64K, which is what was in use until 2000, and where just about everything useful will still reside. The other planes are termed Supplementary.

The supplementary planes are an innovation in how characters are internally represented—programmers have to assume a character can have a million possible values, not just 64K, which means they often have to change their existing code. Furthermore, they are not drastically common in use: most ‘real’ scripts (though not all) are ensconced in the BMP. […]

The informal name for the supplementary planes of Unicode is “astral planes”, since (especially in the late ’90s) their use seemed to be as remote as the theosophical “great beyond”. There has been objection to this jocular usage (see “string vs. char” and subsequent discussion on Unicode list); and as Planes 1 and 2 spread in use there will be less occasion to feel that the planes really are ‘astral’. But the jocular reference is harmless, and it serves as a reminder that we’re not quite there yet.

Astral plane is a joke on Astral plane: they’re “planes” of characters, but they were inaccessible and immaterial, you’d never get to them, your software would never get to them, and you’d never need to get to them: they were abstruse and obscure. The joke was coined on the Unicode mailing list.

The term is still in use; e.g. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/i… . And the term still means something: legacy products still fail to support them (such as… oh, the Quora text editor).

There’s a simple reason why those planes aren’t particularly astral any more. In amongst the Deseret and Nabataean and Egyptian hieroglyphs, there is one set of characters in the supplementary planes that sees a *lot* of usage now, and that users have come to expect all their platforms to support. Those characters weren’t in Unicode when I wrote my page in 2003, but they’re there in the Astral Planes now.

Those characters are, of course, Emoji.

Why didn’t the Byzantine Empire have ethnic conflicts like the Ottoman Empire did?

Do read this in conjunction with:

Stefan Hill’s answer to Why didn’t the Byzantine Empire have ethnic conflicts like the Ottoman Empire did?

Ethnicity was not important in the Medieval world. Common people did not have to communicate with the state. They were supposted to work and pay taxes. The best they could hope for was to be left alone.

In the 19th century that changed.

The flashpoints in the Early Byzantine Empire were religious and doctrinal, but those often ended up being closely correlated with ethnicity—particularly with dyophysitism vs monophysitism (to use each side’s pejoratives). The bulk of the peoples lost by the Empire to the Caliphate were not native speakers of Greek, after all.

After Chalcedonian Christianity, “heresies” remained a flashpoint, but you do also start seeing more clearly ethnic-based conflict. I don’t know what else to call the Uprising of Asen and Peter, for instance:

The Uprising of Asen and Peter (Bulgarian: Въстание на Асен и Петър) was a revolt of Bulgarians and Vlachs living in the theme of Paristrion of the Byzantine Empire, caused by a tax increase. It began on 26 October 1185, the feast day of St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki, and ended with the creation of the Second Bulgarian Empire, ruled by the Asen dynasty.

In fact, the victorious brothers raised a church to the same St Demetrius whose cult site was in Salonica; in other words, they asserted religious continuity with the Empire, but not political allegiance:

After their return, many of the protesters were unwilling to join the rebellion. The brothers Peter and Asen built the Church of St Demetrius of Thessaloniki in Tarnovo, dedicated to Saint Demetrius, who was traditionally considered a patron of the Byzantine city of Thessaloniki, and claimed that the Saint had ceased to favour the Byzantines: “God had decided to free the Bulgarians and the Vlach people and to lift the yoke that they had borne for so long”.