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There’s a lot of subtle linguistic history going on here.

The –ia suffix for names of countries did not get used much in the vernacular of 1800, but when it did, it was pronounced in the vernacular way, as –ja: the vernacular did not tolerate -e– or –i– as a separate syllable before another vowel, and reduced them to yod.

Thus, the vernacular name for the Ottoman Empire, as anyone who has paid attention to Greek folk song knows, was Τουρκιά turˈkja. The vernacular name for Bulgaria was Βουργαριά vurɣarˈja. The vernacular name for Venice was Βενετιά venetˈja (hence the saying έχασε η Βενετιά βελόνι, “Venice has lost a needle” = “big deal”, since everyone knew how rich Venice was). The peasantry rarely had occasion to speak of individual Western countries, but they did refer to the West, collectively, as Φραγκιά fraŋˈɡja “Frankdom”; thus the folk song about 1453 saying Mόν’ στείλτε λόγο στη Φραγκιά, να ’ρτουνε τριά καράβια “Send word to Frankdom to send three ships.”

The vernacular name for Albanians at the time was Αρβανίτες arvaˈnites, and the name from them as a group, or for their country, was Αρβανιτιά arvaniˈtja. As you can guess, this conflates the Christian ethnic Albanians living in Southern Greece (which are now called Arvanites) with the majority Muslim Albanians of Albania proper; if they needed to differentiate the former, they called them Muslim Albanians, which (given the lack of subtlety of the Millet system) was rendered as τουρκαρβανίτες “Turk Arvanites.” (Hence contemporary confusion by Greeks reading old sources, who assume they were some sort of mixed race).

After the introduction of Puristic Greek, and the corresponding looking down on the vernacular, the archaic -i.a form of the suffix displaced the vernacular –ja form. A real country deserved a “real” form of the suffix, and only the classical form –i.a would do. fraŋˈɡja was replaced with Ἑσπερία (H)espeˈri.a, and individuated Roman names (Gallˈi.a, Itaˈli.a, Germaˈni.a, Angˈli.a). turˈkja was replaced with turˈki.a, and vurɣarˈja with vulɣaˈri.a.

And in time the ethnic Albanians of southern Greece, who were being assimilated, were carefully differentiated from the Albanians of Albania, who were not: the former were left with a slight more archaic form of their name, Αλβανίται alvaˈnite (though eventually the vernacular arvaˈnites was restored), and the latter were distanced from the alvaˈnite by the rather older form of their name, which also matched what was being used in the West: Αλβανοί alvaˈni. Their country, accordingly, was Αλβανία alvaˈni.a.

Now the vernacular suffix –ja did not disappear from the face of the earth. It had other uses that remained in Demotic Greek, quite prominently as a nominaliser (στενοχώρια stenoxorˈja ‘sadness’, αρχοντιά arxontˈja ‘nobility’), and as an indication of sudden action (< –e.a: σπαθιά spaθˈja ‘blow of the sword’). But it was mostly displaced by the Puristic –i.a in names of countries and collectives.

Where it was not displaced was in country names, it’s because they weren’t “real” country names, within the reach of officialdom. Karvavitsas’ 1897 novel “The Beggar” shows a subtle distinction between Bulgaria (given its official name) and Vlachia (= Wallachia), as Rumania would still have been colloquially known: στη Σμύρνη, στην Πόλη, στη Βουλγαρία έως επάνω στη Βλαχιά! vulɣaˈri.a vs. vlaxˈja.

The suffix, as I said, also remained used as a nominaliser; when added to names of ethnic groups, it then denoted behaviour stereotypical of the group. I gave the example of arxontˈja ‘lordliness = nobility’; but given xenophobia, such nominalisations were mostly negative. So γύφτος ˈɣiftos ‘Gyspy’ > γυφτιά ɣiftˈja ‘Gypsy behaviour = uncivilised behaviour’. Βλάχος ˈvlaxos ‘Vlach; highlander’ > βλαχιά vlaxˈja or βλαχουριά vlaxurˈja ‘Vlachdom (used both positively and negatively of the Vlach nation—the Aromanian speakers of the southern Balkans); Wallachia (= Southern Romania); uncouthness’.

The homophonous suffix –ja < –ˈe.a, meaning a sudden action (spaθˈja ‘blow of the sword’) has expanded wondrously itself in colloquial Greek, to mean an action in general; it too is latterly applied to country names. So αμερικανιά amerikanˈja is a stereotypically American action (and it will not be meant in a good way); the SLANG.gr definition (Hi Melinda!) is:

Derogatory description of something we dislike and which is American. Usually used of movies. Often expresses the inability of the utter to express serious critical discourse rather than a specific attribute of what is being criticised. Example: “How was the film?” “An amerikanˈja.” “What do you mean?” “I’m telling you: an amerikanˈja.”

So. I actually have not ever heard the expression Αλβανιά alvanˈja. But this is what it can mean.

• It cannot be an old-fashioned, ballad-like name for Albania or Albaniandom, the way turˈkja or vurɣarˈja are. (vurɣarˈja, Google tells me, is still used in a hostile way by soldiers on the Bulgarian border.) It cannot be, because the stem is not vernacular: it’s alvanˈja, using the Puristic form of the stem, not the original vernacular arvanitˈja.
• It can be a derogatory description of an action (à la amerikanˈja). The xenophobic stereotype of what Albanians are like must have moved on since 1990s, but if I were confronted with an expression like τι αλβανιά πήγες κι έκανες, “What sort of Albanianry have you gone and done”, I would assume that petty crime or smuggling was involved.
• It can be a derogatory term for behaviour xenophobically stereotypical of Albanians. Pretty much as above, but not the description of a one-off action, but of habitual behaviour.
• It can be a derogatory term for Albania itself, or for a collective of Albanians.

On days when I’m catching up on A2A backlogs (such as today), me. My time on Quora varies between half an hour and six hours a day. It is, on average, way too much.

The title to this video. A late hit (1961) by the great Markos Vamvakaris, that I have slightly maliciously aligned to my current feelings about Quora.

This is a lame way of getting this video out, but it works for me!

Quora Bot as female lead, Nick Nicholas as male lead; Quora staff as female backup, Quora users as male backup

(In general: I take notes to myself as to-dos at work a few times a week; I take notes in meetings by pen occasionally, but in general I write things down rarely.)

Yes indeed. Bear in mind in particular that Greek and Latin fall under the rules of Traditional English pronunciation of Latin. (Greek is almost always borrowed into English via Latin; but there are late exceptions like kudos, not †cydus.) Those rules are not the rules of French words in English. For example, final –e in a Greek word like psyche is always pronounced; it is never pronounced in French or Germanic words.

(That link should be mandatory reading for everyone ever btw. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve learned from it.)

Germanic and French spellings get squashed together via the crucible of Middle English spelling—and Middle English itself; but you can still discern differences. For example <k> is a Germanic thing; word-final stress is a French thing.

I was A2A’d this by Beorn Stefanson, but it applies generally.

First thing to do, if forced to become Sage’s bestie, would be to read all their Quora content, to identify areas of common interest.

Next would be to strike up banter with them in comments.

Next would be to start chatting with them in a more real-time venue; Quora Messages, or Facebook Messenger.

I delighted once or twice in doing drive-by gloats of threads in which Top Writers have just been shocked to discover that Quora doesn’t particularly care what they want, and peppering comments with repeated use of the word “fungible”. That’s dwelling on it, though, not really dealing with it.

I’ve worked at raising consciousness about what happens here, in and beyond those drive-by gloats. That’s still dwelling on it, though, and Quora has no shortage of fresh missteps to document.

I’m trying to move on from answering too many questions about the Removal of Details, which is one way.

I delight in making fun of Quora Inc., which is another: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What was the last thing you wrote by hand?

I write impossibly obscure and detailed, Medium post-like answers to non-personal but snowflakey questions, that no computer could feasibly extract meaning out of, and no canonicity is relevant to. Like Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is the so-called Greek word Albania/Αλβανιά (derogatory word), and from what does it stem?; or Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why didn’t the Greeks convert to Catholicism under the Latin Empire? Those were fun. Those were long. Those were not addressed to Quora bots. In some ways, in fact, those are the postludes to my Der Krämerspiegel.

It’s a somewhat stretched analogy (which I’ve used here once before). Let me work through it.

Richard Strauss: Der Krämerspiegel, Op 66

Unfortunately, in the contract for Opus 56, he had unwisely allowed a clause to be inserted giving Bote & Bock the rights to his next six songs whenever they might be composed.

Becoming increasingly at loggerheads with the firm, Strauss prevaricated for as long as he could. […] But in 1918 he found himself threatened with a court case. By then he had in his desk drawer the six Brentano-Lieder, later published as Opus 68 (see Volume 5), but he had no intention of surrendering such a magnificent set to Bote & Bock.

Instead he turned to Alfred Kerr, a well-known Berlin literary critic, who in March 1918 produced for him a witty set of satirical verses lampooning music publishers, and mentioning many of Strauss’s principal enemies by name. By May Strauss had set all twelve poems to music and dispatched them to Bote & Bock, who not surprisingly refused them out of hand. […]

It is easy to understand why the cycle is now rarely performed, given that the texts consist entirely of in-jokes, and that the lion’s share of the music is given to the pianist. But Strauss’s music is well worth savouring, not least for its humorous references to Strauss’s own works, such as Der Rosenkavalier and Ein Heldenleben, and especially for the beautiful prelude to the eighth song and its reprise as the final extended postlude. This has a history quite independent of the cycle, as Strauss revived its lyrical, Schumannesque theme nearly a quarter of a century later, in his opera Capriccio.

Michael S. Hurst did his PhD on Der Krämerspiegel in 2007: Interpreting Richard Strauss’s Der Krämerspiegel from the perspectives of the performers and the audience. The sense he makes of that postlude: it’s Strauss telling his publishers, “this is the music you could have had from me, if you’d only treated me with respect.”

Write the content you want, because it makes you happy, and it makes the people you’re trying to help happy. What Quora wants is secondary. It cannot but be secondary: we write for us, not for D’Angelo. It’s not like he’s paying us to write here.

Make yourself proud of what you write here. That’s the best revenge, and that’s the best way of getting over it. In particular, if you’re here to help specific question askers, and not a canonicity bot, then strike up a conversation with them in question comments on what they’re after. That’s still allowed.

And if that becomes untenable, *shrug* take your content elsewhere. Strauss did end up reusing that tune, after all.

A fair few.

• Iranian and Azeri culture: Pegah Esmaili
• Turkish culture: several posters, but Ayse Temmuz and Sam Snow stand out for me.
• Albanian culture: several posters again, but Kelvin Zifla, Alket Cecaj and Stiven Llupa…
• … who I’ve just realised has deleted his account. Bugger.
• Greek culture: Dimitra Triantafyllidou and Evangelos Lolos are only primi inter pares. Too many to mention.
• Music: Curtis Lindsay.
• History: Dimitris Almyrantis.
• Transgender issues: Jae Alexis Lee.
• Literature: Michael Masiello.
• Courtesy: Edward Conway.
• Judgement: Jennifer Edeburn.

The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium confirms John Bard’s answer:

As late as the 4th C., the Mediterranean continued to be an “inner sea,” totally surrounded by the territory of the Roman Empire. It was the only sea for Greeks, the esō thalassa [internal sea] (Aristotle) as opposed to the exō thalassa [external sea] or ocean; for the Latins the mare internum, intestinum, or nostrum. The term mare mediterraneum did not appear until the 3rd C.; Isidore of Seville used it in the early 7th C. (O. Maull. RE 15 [1932] 2222). The Byz. did not have a general term for the Mediterranean, although they used special names for its parts—the Aegean, Ionian, Tyrsenikon (or Tyrrhenian), Sikelikon, Kretikon pelagos [sea].

For the same reason my bio on Quora topics promotes Quora Base Camp.

The studious lack of onboarding on Quora has been a long-running problem, and there have been tens of attempts by its users over the years to remedy it with their own guides. The problem has been that none of those attempts have gathered critical mass of visibility: the wheel keeps getting reinvented, and noone much gets to go on a ride on it.

Jennifer Edeburn, whom I count as a friend, had a genius idea when she embarked on her own attempt to write a guide for readers: viral marketing. Using our bios as walking billboards, to guide new (and not so new) users to help about Quora.

I thought it a brilliant idea, and I went one better when it went live. Necrologue, for better or worse, has a readership; and its footer is now a walking billboard for Quora Base Camp too.

I agree with Dion Shaw’s answer: detecting irony is a subtle skill, which requires you to deduce, from real world knowledge, that the speaker intends the complete opposite of what they’re literally saying, and that they think it’s appropriate to do so because they regard the question as not worth answering literally (typically because they regard the answer as obvious).

Computers aren’t doing well at detecting irony in general, and the problem is AI-hard. (Real Artificial Intelligence, with a social and intentional factor, not just machine learning.) In fact, the one paper I read about it recently was as crude as it possibly could be—it only got so far as working out that the person was speaking an untruth, ergo, Irony! But of course lying, error, and irony are not the same thing at all, even if all of them reduce to the same truth-conditional purview of a statement not being true.

Quora’s algorithms, sadly, as not in the business of extracting truth from ironic answers, which is at least part of the reason why Joke Answers are frowned upon. I have to say, I find it difficult to see how Quora’s algorithms are extracting meaning from the wide range of answers given here at all. But they don’t have to; they merely have to understand upvotes, credentials, and social networks of users.