Category: Uncategorized

You know that Latin saying de gustibus non disputandum? There’s no point arguing about taste? Because it’s individual?

The full saying is de gustibus et coloribus non disputandum. Because they’re both subjective experiences. As confirmed by #TheDress / What Color Is This Dress?

Green grapes and purple grapes have different taste and different colour. All the more non disputanda, then.

Green grapes are tart. They explode in your mouth with vivifying punch.

Purple grapes are sweet. They soothe your mouth with honeyed mellowness.

As another hallowed Interwebs meme has proclaimed:

Why Not Both? / Why Don’t We Have Both?

Found one!

1 Corinthians 15:50

Τοῦτο δέ φημι, ἀδελφοί, ὅτι σὰρξ καὶ αἷμα βασιλείαν Θεοῦ κληρονομῆσαι οὐ δύναται, οὐδὲ ἡ φθορὰ τὴν ἀφθαρσίαν κληρονομεῖ.

“Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.”

The verb for cannot is singular in the Greek.

See also On Hendiadys in Greek. Nothing useful there, though it does mention that hendiadys is routinely ignored in accounts of Classical Greek—but noted in accounts of Biblical Greek.

Vocaroo | Voice message

OK, OK, I yield to the inevitable. Word of the day is in fact, “covfefe” – ‘a summoning word of fearsome power, never to be used lightly.’ pic.twitter.com/PE4Oc4CPS5

— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) May 31, 2017

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some words or phrases that are only used in your region?

Trebizond is derived from the Ancient Greek Trapezous (genitive Trapezountos, hence Modern Greek Trapezounda), meaning ‘table-like’, and referring to the mountain formation in the area.

Per People and Culture: Trebižat River,

There are two theories on how the river got its name. The first one says that it was named “Trebižat” because it escapes from the surface three times. According to the second theory, the name comes from the Italian “il trebizatto”, meaning the river is rich in eels.

So, unlikely, and I wouldn’t have thought there’s a clear reason why you’d name the river after such a far-off city anyway. Especially when the river gets a different name each of the nine times it resurfaces above ground to begin with (Trebižat (river) – Wikipedia)—so none of the originally named instances were particularly long or, I’d have thought, widely known.

Necrologue: at least 100 followers. No exceptions. Well, one exception I made on April Fool’s Day, but that was a Let It Burn kind of day anyway.

Argologue: no restriction.

It’s a comparison you hear often (“Australia: a combination of the best parts of California and England”), and it’s not unfounded:

• Both are warmish—by Anglosphere standards
• Both are informal—by Anglosphere standards (insert “by Anglosphere standards” in all the following)
• Both are outgoing and friendly according to their own self-perception
• Both prioritise a relaxed lifestyle
• Both promote a beach culture
• Both have discovered winemaking
• Both have had (at least historically) a sense of optimism about the future
• Both got established through gold rushes

Having lived in both, California is still much closer to the American norm than anything in Australia, and I think the similarities are on the superficial side. For example, both are outgoing and friendly, but I still found Californians to be too in-your-face for me.

A close companion to What in your opinion is the ugliest/most unappealing script?

Cultural familiarity is going to defuse anyone’s opinion; so you won’t get many responses nominating Latin, or anything originating on the same continent as Latin.

Is it Lontara alphabet, optimised to be written on palm leaves? Is it Vai syllabary, which aesthetically occupies a middle ground between a syllabary (which it is) and hieroglyphics? Is it Ogham, which reduces letters to tally strokes?

I’m going to go with Duployan. Duployan is a French shorthand system, and Duployan was used to write down Chinook Jargon. That’s why it has been added to Unicode: Duployan (Unicode block).

As a shorthand, Duployan was designed for easy and fluent joining together of characters. What it was not designed for was straightforward rendering in either print or a computer screen. Read the rules for rendering the script in the 2009 proposal to include Duployan in Unicode, or the Unicode Technical Note Duployan Shorthand, and wince.

Like this kibbitzing site says: Crazy On Tap – Unicode 7

That Duployan by the way is an obscure form of shorthand that was proposed for a small number of weird languages, but which actually never caught on. All those languages use different orthographies now. Duployan is impossible to render using standard font engines because the shapes can combine in infinite combinations, and do stuff like the end of one segment connects to the start of the next, and they can rotate. It would be easier to implement rendering of fancy calligraphy or handwriting that looks totally real.

“Duployan orienting vowels are written by rotating the vowel to match the incoming angle of the preceding character, then mirrored along the axis of that character to avoid the following character crossing.”

Good luck updating your font renderer to handle this character range.

Today, I felt sad for the Greek language.

As I was describing on Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does modern Greek still have Latin prefixes and suffixes?, Greek has withstood the pressure to make like the Western languages for millennia. Oh, the common folk borrowed words from Latin and Turkish and Italian and Albanian, but scholarly vocabulary? Borrow from Latin? Screw that, we taught those beef-eaters everything they know. So for millennia, every scholarly term of Latin origin was meticulously calqued into Greek elements.

We had a great run of it. The run’s pretty much over. There’s some valiant work to keep calquing westernisms, but today I came across an instance where we just gave up.

The instance, maybe not that surprisingly, is vocabulary about gender, which has undergone upheaval in the last decade or so.

For links to what’s happened, see the linked answer. I’m drawing on the reports of Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou, a trans woman who was involved in coining native terms (and abandoned them) (transgender = διεμφυλικός, Η δήθεν ανακοίνωση των μουσουλμάνων και τα ψέματα (;) του Άδωνη), and on perusal of Greek Wikipedia.

Greek runs into a few problems when trying to render the concepts transgender, intersex, and cis.

• Greek does not differentiate between gender and sex. They’re both phylon (phlyum). To render the English distinction, Greek has to resort to ‘biological gender’ vs ‘social gender’. Which makes the distinction much clearer, but is also awkward.
• Greek does not differentiate between the prefixes trans– and inter-. Both are rendered as dia-, meaning ‘across’.
• Greek does not have a notion of cis– as a prefix at all. It certainly has a notion of ‘this side of the river’ or ‘this side of the mountain’ in place names; but that notion is expressed as mesa vs exō ‘Inner vs Outer’; e.g. Mesa Mani and Exo Mani. It’s not a notion that you can usefully contrast with trans-.

Greek rather cluelessly called transgender people travesti ‘transvestites’ for a while. (To be fair, most people did, including transgender people themselves.) When it faced having to render transsexual, and then transgender… it got stuck.

(Cross-dressers, at least, was much easier to render in Greek: travesti has been replaced by par-endyt-ikos. That’s para- as in para-military: unconventionally dressing, if you like.)

Neofotistou and other trans people got together and came up with something ingenious to render both intersex and transgender. Naively, you could calque it as dia-phylos or dia-phyl-ikos ‘inter-gender, trans-gender’. But because dia– ‘across’ means both inter and trans, that doesn’t get you far. Never mind trying to differentiate sex and gender in the name—that’s just hopeless in Greek.

What they did was, pick up the adjective em-phylos ‘in-gender’ (or ‘in-tribe’—because the two words are not coincidentally related: gender was first identified as a ‘tribe’ of people). The adjective was already in use for a while, to use ‘within a tribe’; it’s a synonym of emphylios, which is used for ‘civil war’ (within a tribe). There was a biological use of em-phylos, to refer to reproduction in which both genders were involved. Latterly, em-phylos refers to the adjective ‘gender’ as in gender studies or gender roles; phenomena that gender is embedded in (‘in-gender’, ‘gendered’).

Neofotistou’s group decided to differentiate between phyl-ikos ‘sex-related’ and em-phyl-ikos ‘relating to the in-gender’, but they then interpreted em-phylos as ‘the gender one is born with’. So intersex is dia-phyl-ikos ‘across sex’ (across the two sexes); but transgender is di-em-phyl-ikos ‘across the in-sex’ (differentiated from the sex of birth).

You’ll see both diaphylikos and diemphylikos used online to render ‘transgender’. But what you’ll see overwhelmingly is trans and transdzender. Including by Neofotistou herself, who dismisses her coinages as pedantic and clinical.

I’m not sure what you *would* do with cis in this case; Greek Wikipedia just gives up and contrasts Τρανς – Βικιπαίδεια with Cisgender – Βικιπαίδεια, abbreviated cis or μη τρανς ‘non trans’. If people cared about using Greek terms, you could go with emphylikos ‘of the in-sex’ (sex of birth), or to make the point more explicitly, adiemphylikos ‘not across the in-sex’.

No hits for either on Google. Noone’s even trying any more.

I don’t know that I can convey what a feeling of loss I have, to have seen this. Greek-speakers themselves are used to using English terms for modern concepts, and they won’t see what the fuss is about. English-speakers are likely relieved that Greek-speakers use their terms.

But… it’s seeing a language that held out for millennia, saying “screw your Latinate vocabulary, we taught you beef-eaters everything you know”… crumple.

A small thing to get hung up on, perhaps. And after all, quem patronum rogaturus, cum vix justus sit securus: German Quora is full of programming questions, with half their terminology in English. I wish I could find it again (Quora Search), but I just saw a question there about which the most popular programming languages were in Chemical Engineering—and so help me, Chemical Engineering was in English. Didn’t those guys invent that discipline? And all the other disciplines in existence?

This… is what made me sad today.

The results of Are you seeing ads on Quora? by Nick Nicholas on Assorted Polls as of this writing:

79 answers received. 13 have never seen an ad, 66 have.

Of the 13 who have never seen an ad, 6 are current TW, and 7 are not. Of those who are not, 3 are in North America, 2 in Europe, 2 in Asia.

Of the 66 who have seen ads, 1 is a former TW, and the remaining 65 are not TW. Of the 66, 10 are in Asia, 6 in Europe, 41 in North America, 5 in Oceania, 2 in South America, and 2, somehow, are Other.

This confirms that Top Writers are not seeing ads; the immunity of Former Top Writers, which has also been reported, is not necessarily universal. No clear correlation with region in visibility of ads.