Category: Uncategorized

Because she no longer wishes to be on Quora.

Yes, I know this from her. Several Quora users are in touch with her on Facebook.

No, I am not going to elaborate.

InB4 some shmuck reports this question and it gets deleted…

Question details indicate that the original OP is “in my final year of high school in rural Western Australia.”

This humbled me out of the smart-aleck answer I was going to give; Ben Kelley’s answer is excellent for this serious aim.

…

Without that context?

“Mal. Mal, Mal, Mal. Come on, mate. Just between you and me. What’ll it take for you to form a centrist party with Nick Xenophon? You know you want to.”

… Am I throwing away my chance to get a serious answer to a pressing question? Yes, I am. Mal is not the master of his own party, any more than the Australian PM is the master of his own country. Geopolitics doesn’t work like that any more.

I hate The West Wing. I hate The West Wing for many reasons, most of them involving Josh. I liked Season #5 most, the season everyone else hated, because it was the season that bitch-slapped the cast, and especially Josh. (That’s also why I liked Ryan the intern, the character everyone else hated.)

Remember those IT workers in #519 Talking Points who did a sit-in in Josh’s office, because they’d been shafted out of Bartlett’s election pledge that their jobs in IT were safe? And Josh went pleading to Bartlett to no effect? That’s Bartlett, who embraced Creative destruction—the notion that, in real life, made Trump possible. Josh, campaigning two years later for that pointless cipher Santos, was making the same undertakings on the campaign trail. You weren’t meant to notice that, but I did. God, did I want Josh fricking Lyman eviscerated on the spot.

Anyway, what did Bartlett say when Josh said “we promised these guys jobs?”

There was a man named Canute, one of the great Viking kings of the 11th Century. Wanted his people to be aware of his limitations, so he led them down to the sea and he commanded that the tide roll out. It didn’t. Who gave us the notion that Presidents can move the economy like a play-toy?

The candidates for the presidency did while campaigning, actually. And for economy, read also geopolitics, and climate change, and whatever other great challenges facing humanity that we’re going to flub.

And that’s why I wouldn’t ask a serious question of Turnbull. Or whoever else is residing in The Lodge this month.

And I hope my cynicism doesn’t rub off on OP…

The answer has been given by Anthony Thompson’s answer and Chrys Jordan’s answer. I’m going to spell out a bit more the general principles at work.

Fitting language history into a tree structure requires some simplifying assumptions. In particular, you have to be able to assume that a language has a single parent proto-language (otherwise it’s no longer a tree). You also have to assume a difference between the guts of the language and the minor add-ons of a language. Japanese may have borrowed the word anime from English, but that does not mean Japanese is related to English. Usually, you can differentiate borrowed words from a core vocabulary, and ignore the former when determining language relations. The “guts” of a language also includes how its grammar works.

The tree model was not unanimously accepted when proposed, and there was a rival Wave model of language change, which allows for shades of gray. There are languages which have been massively relexified (much of their core vocabulary is also borrowed), or whose grammar has been profoundly influenced by neighbouring languages in Sprachbunds. Fitting such hybrid languages to the tree model is problematic. The same goes for pidgins and creoles.

There are many languages that you would have trouble fitting to a tree model of affiliation. Yiddish is not such a language. The fact that it uses Hebrew script, is is spoken by Jews, and has a substantial layer of loans from Hebrew and Aramaic do not change the fact that its “guts” are still Germanic.

One of its prominent proponents is on record as saying so:

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/…

Andy Statman, one of the foremost Klezmer musicians in the world, knows that the time of Klezmer has passed.

“Each music has its point,” He explained over the phone while working at a Mandolin camp in California. “[Klezmer] is still alive, but in many ways it doesn’t really represent a living community. While it’s still alive and it’s great music and people enjoy it… It’s not a reflection of the time.”

[…]

About the future of Klezmer, Statman said it wasn’t bittersweet.

“Like bluegrass [music], it’s from a time and place,” he said. “It changed and the music was moving on to become something else. That’s the way it is. Styles come and go. They reflect the lives and the people who are involved in them… Each day is new.”

Klezmer is dead, or alive, in the same way I guess that Rebetiko is dead, or alive. The social circumstances that gave rise to it aren’t there any more. Any performance of it is a revival, a repurposing of the genre to current concerns—all tangled up with anxiety about authenticity, which guarantees that it won’t respond fully to current concerns. At its worse, it’s an artificial museum-like exercise. At its best, it gets the crowds dancing in the aisles one last time.

Rebetiko was revived in the 70s in Greece, because something in it spoke to Greeks, as they were at the threshold of becoming Europeans. Klezmer was revived in the 80s in America, because something in it spoke to Jews, as they were at the threshold of becoming either fully assimilated, or (as was the case with Statman) rediscovering Orthodox Judaism.

Rebetiko and Klezmer had, in fact, already died:

Klezmer is the Eastern European musical tradition passed down from one generation to the next. (“It’s basically Chasidic music,” Statman said.) The exact history of the music was unknown to him, save for the fact that when Statman began playing Klezmer, it had almost been gone.

“A lot of where the music was played didn’t make it out,” he said. “Russia, Galicia, a lot of Chasidim. I think not only the Holocaust but there was more of an interest in preserving Judaism and the community. Music was not such a pressing concern.”

Vamvakaris at least kept playing in the 50s and 60s, but he was no longer the main show.

A revival is never as vibrant as the original; it’s always qualified and unspontaneous. There’s always something artificial about it.

Still. It’s better than utter oblivion. And damn, but there’s some good toe-tapping to be had in that museum…

See Nick Nicholas’ answer to Who is the most famous Greek who was named Alexander in the previous 15 centuries (one for each century)? and Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer to Who is the most famous Greek who was named Alexander in the previous 15 centuries (one for each century)?

tl;dr: for Greeks who are famous to this day, you probably have to wait until the 19th century, though Alexander (Byzantine emperor) is not nothing.

Add to Andrew Noe’s answer:

• For historical linguistics, Uniformitarianism. (Yes, I know the link describes the geological version of that hypothesis.) The notion that human language in the past worked pretty much the same way as human language works now.
• For structuralism, as an underpinning of how we do linguistics in general: the Arbitrariness of the sign: the fact that language is mostly autonomous of the things it describes.
• For syntax, if you learn nothing else, configurationality: the notion that phrase structure rules work to describe the syntax of language, that words group together to form distinct constituents. Especially fun because of the contortions syntacticians go through to account for Non-configurational languages.
• For pragmatics, Speech act theory, accounting for language not as a mere conveying of meaning, but as agents trying to get things done in the world.

Most decidedly what Alexander Lee’s answer, says, the notifications.

Smart Filter? Yeah, like I’m going to trust Quora to filter our what I don’t want to see.

In addition, the deluge of A2As, particularly if you can’t stand to be ruthless and blip them all off. They malinger for weeks, and they malinger all the worse when they’re below your event horizon, in the “other” instead of the “most recent” category.

Like this one was, Martin 🙂

Having a sense of responsibility towards your readership is definitely a downside others have reported, but that is going to be subjective. I feel weighed down by my responsibilities to the readership of The Insurgency or Necrologue; I don’t feel weighed down by my 3k followers.

Mostly because I only actually know a tuthree hundred of them. That is a downside though; after the first 500 followers, they all fade into an undifferentiated mass of new followers, that you simply don’t have the capacity to pay especial attention to individually. That, you just let go of; if you happen to notice one or another in interactions, fine, else, also fine.

The Press Club mentioned in other answers (which are now a few years old) is the flagship of celebrity restauranteur George Calombaris, and was at the forefront of nouveau Greek cuisine. Calombaris was into molecular gastronomy before he was into nouveau Greek, and you could tell: there was tzatziki ice cream to be had.

The Press Club was astonishing in the mid 2000s: every dish a surprise. By the time I last went there, before it closed for refurbishment (and to be shrunk to a third of its size and three times the already inflated prices), it had become a disappointment. I haven’t been to the new place (though I have been to the 2/3 of the restaurant that now serves nouveau Greek street food, trading as Gazi.)

Of the nouveau Greek places, I’d name Hellenic Republic, which Calombaris also runs. It’s not as experimental, but it’s good quality.

I have not checked out the nouveau Cretan place Elyros Restaurant yet. Got to get around to that.

The problem with old school Greek places is that the quality is very often lacking. Especially if they are meat platter joints or tavernas. Most places in Oakleigh, Melbourne’s Greektown, are not to be recommended. (Although at least at Kalimera you’ll get an actual Greek-style souvlaki, and I was impressed by the same owners’ Mykonos taverna.)

There is a hidden jewel in Oakleigh though. Literally hidden: it’s up a flight of stairs around the corner from Eaton Mall; you have to know of it to pop up there.

Mezedakia. Good Greek home cooking, utterly unreconstructed, utterly what mama used to cook, and utterly delicious. No souvlaki platters, and no tzatziki ice cream. Ask for the revani ahead of time. (What is it on Wikipedia? Oh: Basbousa.)

I’d hate to think that I’ll get her in trouble by writing this. But.

Sihem Soibinet-Fekih is the International Writer Relations—French staff from Quora. Meaning, she’s the Jonathan Brill of French Quora.

I don’t spend a lot of time on the non-English Quoras, because my non-English languages are not that good (there isn’t going to be a Greek Quora), and because my backlog is ongoing and is on English Quora. But I have been consistently impressed with how Sihem has done her job.

I posed on Quora French, a few days back, the question:

Quelle a été la réaction de la communauté de Quora française à la suppression des détails des questions ?

(What was the French Quora community’s reaction to the removal of question details?)

And then went away. It’s been a busy week on the Insurgency, after all.

Pretty promptly after that, Sihem followed the question.

… Can you imagine Brill following that question?

I expect no response from Sihem. And I’m not writing this to get one.

But, Sihem, merci infiniment. Vous avez confirmée le raison de mon respect envers vous.

For Modern Greek, the following sounds are cross-linguistically rare, and certainly rare among European languages:

• ɣ ~ ʝ: γάμος, γέρος
• x ~ ç: χάμω, χελιδόνι
• ɟ [the palatalised allophone of ɡ]: αγγίζω
• ð, θ: δέντρο, θάμνος
• r: ρέμα (people really don’t deal well with trills)
• Initial clusters like ks, ps, vl, vr, ðr, ðj, ɣl, ɣr: ξέρω, ψέμα, βλέπω, βρίσκω, δράμα, διάνα, γλόμπος, γράμμα