Nick on Quora

Since Profanity as such is no longer banned on Quora, my response is: Του Αγίου Πούτσου.

That can be paraphrased as “Never”.

(It literally means “St Penis’ Day”, because Greeks are strange like that.)

Nick Nicholas’ answer to After “Quora auf Deutsch” what is the next language Quora will target? is a summary of discussions Josephine Stefani, Clarissa Lohr and I have had about the likely Quora internationalisation roadmap.

The choice of Italian remains an oddity among the potential candidates. I am not convinced by the purchasing power of the number of Italian-speaking Google users that might stumble on a Quora answer in a search, and see an ad there (the bottom line explanation for Quora internationalisation priorities).

But 60 million Italian-speakers on Google, living in a teetering economy within the First World, are still a much more compelling proposition for would-be advertisers on Quora than 10 million Greek-speakers on Google, living in a collapsed economy, within whatever world Greece now finds itself in.

And that’s the calculation. If the calculation were Wikipedia-style altruism, there’d be a Quora in Arabic and in Hausa already.

Unlike others here, I would be delighted if there were a Quora in Greek; but then again, I’m in the diaspora, so I miss being immersed in Greek. German Quorans I know were ambivalent about the point of a German Quora too, but I note that while some will not set foot on it (Kat), others have taken it up despite their scepticism (Clarissa Lohr). The global reach of English Quora is unlikely to be diluted, and the Other-Language Quoras can readily occupy a niche alongside it.

(Niche is not what Quora likely had in mind for all those Googling users and their monetisable clickbait. It’ll be interesting to see how many eyeballs Spanish Quora attracts that weren’t already on English Quora.)

But a Greek Quora? Only if Quora Inc turns into Wikimedia, and releases its software for public tinkering and customisation.

Like I said. Του Αγίου Πούτσου.

If a language is agglutinative, or has a halfway decent derivational morphology, you can keep making up words based on other words for as long as you like, and those words will be perfectly acceptable. So there is not much of a limit.

There is a limit in how many building blocks of words (morphemes) someone can retain, and those morphemes will correspond to the vocabulary of someone speaking a purely isolating language. (Spoken Chinese isn’t as pure about this as it likes to think it is. Classical Chinese is, but classical Chinese is clearly heavily stylised.)

So, to turn this question into a question somewhat more clearly related to the limitations of human linguistic processing: how many characters can a Chinese speaker retain? Or, how big is the vocabulary of the average English speaker? (which is somewhat close to this, though English derivational morphology is still productive).

The answer for an individual is in the order of magnitude of 10,000. For a contemporary language with a wide range of specialist vocabularies, you are ranging across the vocabulary of all members of the speech community. That means you add one order of magnitude to the size of the available stock of morphemes; you don’t add two.

Appropriateness is always relative. We might like to think that there are universal norms applicable to all people and all situations. It simply does not work like that.

Profanity signals intimacy, because it presupposes a level of trust that the addressee will not take offence, and it situates the interlocutors as both being rebels against outsider norms of propriety, which signals solidarity. The same reasoning applies to the old taboos on sex and scatology, and the new taboos on race and sexuality.

• Nick Nicholas’ answer to Did Quora add emoji support?
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why doesn’t Quora allow the use of emoticons, when it would make the site more interactive?
• Evgeniy Pavlov’s answer to Why doesn’t Quora allow the use of emoticons, when it would make the site more interactive?

Back when I was lecturing, I made a consistent effort to be the weirdest thing in the room. If I was running late, I would boom the opening words of my lecture while walking down the corridor into the theatre. I would walk into lecture drinking a Slurpee, and remind students that no eating or drinking was allowed in the theatre. I would reuse my Introduction To Linguistics slides from the previous year, and point out that the essential nature of human language had not altered significantly in the past 12 months. I would intersperse my lecture with random dated pop culture references from the 90s and dad jokes. I opened my first lecture on historical linguistics in Old English. I paced the room, gesticulating and expostulating.

Of course you are not surprised to read this.

I was something of an acquired taste, but I had a mature age student point out to me that during my lectures, you could hear a pin drop.

As a result, and being transfixed by my own antics, I didn’t notice any weird happenings among the students. I had colleagues that did. One colleague noted the incongruity between the couple taking notes above the desk, and what their hands were doing to each other below the desk.

Alas, I was absent the day my peers brought a stripper to scare off the curmudgeonly lecturer during his final Fortran lecture. (It didn’t work. “You are not a student enrolled in this course! Please leave!”) I was there, however, when a group of students performed the Dutch national anthem for our Dutch computer architecture lecture, and the Danish national anthem for our Danish operating systems lecturer.

I was in fact the soloist.

Wilhelmus van Nassouwe ben ik, van Duitsen bloed….

Edward Conway has assembled the following list of Quora blogs, some of which were new to me. Some of these have not been updated in years; some of these are where we get the latest skinny from. All of these, we submit to your attention. Thank you, Edward!

---

Some of these are tangential…and unfortunately Paul Stockley’s answer to In April 2017, how do you find out which blogs you follow in Quora? means compiling a list is by memory and recent Notifications, as Following a Blog is not listed the way Following a Quoran is…

Official Word of Quora:

• Media Spotlight – everything published in authorized media republishers of Quora content, each week, by publisher
• Sessions on Quora (upcoming Sessions, basically for Quora Sessions what Media Spotlight is for republishing)
• The Quora Moderation Blog
• Quora Design – Design and technical posts from Quora employees about Quora
• Engineering at Quora – Similar to the above
• Data @ Quora
• https://building-quora.quora.com/
• Quora Product Updates – Where Quora Employees announce new features and changes.
• The Quora Blog – similar to the above
• Quora Boards Updates – older, but has some interesting historical content
• Quora & the World – ditto

Not labeled as official, but often posted to by officials and useful in getting official rulings:

• Topic Gnomery (asking questions and discussing Topic architecture)
• Quora Topic Ontology Blog (official announcements about Topic architecture)
• Moderation FAQs (thanks to Amanda Harris )
• Life at Quora – living as a Quora employee
• Publish This: Quora’s Publishing Nominations Blog (blog is official, and is a useful nominating place for content to be later republished and highlighted in Media Spotlight above, however individual posts are not official)
• Redirect Hell (asking questions about question merging)

Not official, but used to discuss and share ideas for improving Quora:

• Quora Feature Requests Notepad

Not official, but frequently triggers official comments, discussion, and input:

• Quora Topic Bot Humor (arguably worth pairing with Topic Gnomery, given how often the “QTB did something silly -> people comment -> QTB staff comments and discusses solutions” scenario plays out there)

Uncertain status:

• Quora Bug Reports
• Quora Help Desk – has some useful links Quora needs to add to a FAQ
• Quora Question Patterns

I’m reiterating what my fellow Greeks are saying, but to be really really explicit:

• The metaphorical meaning of Philistine (Φιλισταίοι) to mean someone anti-intellectual is absent from Greek. The typical words would be άξεστος “uncouth”, χωριάτης “peasant”, (learnèd) άμουσος “un-Mused, alien to the muses”, (Turkish) χαϊβάνι “animal”.
• Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής says that άμουσος = “uncultivated” is old fashioned, and the current meaning is “unmusical, without a musical education”. Shows you what kind of Greek I’ve been reading…
• As Alexandros Gerofotis (Αλέξανδρος Γεροφώτης)’s answer points out, the metaphor that has persisted is λακωνικός “laconic”. People know the stereotype of the uncompromising Spartan,and people would get your meaning (especially if you prefixed it with σωστός “a proper”, which emphasises that it is metaphorical). But they would think “bellicose” or “patriotic” rather than “uncompromising” or “aesthetically bare”.
• For the latter (“spartan decor”), we use λιτός (as in litotes), the term the Spartans themselves would have used. For the former, αρβανίτης “Arvanite, ethnic Albanian” would be a more up-to-date allusion, but it is also more derogatory. The Venetian loanword ντούρος “upright, unbending” would also work.

To elaborate on Niko Vasileas’ answer and Michael Anderson’s answer:

Nominative Iōn, Genitive Iōn-os, Adjective Iōn-ikos or Iōn-ios refers to the tribe of Ionians.

Adjective Iŏn-ios refers to the sea, and is traditionally derived from the lover of Zeus, Io (mythology): Nominative Iō, Genitive Ious < *Iŏ-os. Io, transformed into a cow, is supposed to have crossed both the Bosphorus (“ox passage”) and the Ionian Sea, before being restored to human form.

Io (mythology) – Wikipedia: Juno, Jupiter and Io by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout.

Grammatically, I’m not convinced by Io; Sardŏnios ‘Sardonic, Sardinian’ is derived from Sard-ō, -ous “Sardinia”, but Sardō did also have a Sard-ŏnos genitive. So as Nikos says, it’s potentially something else. At any rate, it is unlikely to have anything to do with the Ionian tribe.

Almost exclusively from blog readers PM’ing me or emailing me with information, as I request in the blog guidelines. For Quit notices, they are usually the people quitting themselves. Very rarely, I notice someone banned; a little more often, I notice a “why was X banned” question before it gets deleted.

I have no direct or indirect communication line from Quora itself, and I have received no communication from Quora since launching the blog (including a response to my question about whether they had a problem with it).

This is kind of lame (and TV rather than movie), but I guess I had a sheltered upbringing, and I was just six.

1977 was the heyday of Alice Cooper. As a sophisticated adult, I can now appreciate the antics of Alice for what they were, and even stifle a yawn at them. But as an impressionable six-year-old, not so much.

The scene that scared me was nothing about Satan worship, or fans dismembering chickens. It was, of all things, an award show, at the end of which Alice saw fit to pull a gun. The host (was it Dionne Warwick?) shrieked, the credits rolled, and I was terrified that Mayhem had seemingly intruded on the propriety of Hollywood.

Yes, Michaelis Maus, I was already inhabiting The Matrix.

For a couple of years after, Alice Cooper was at the lead of my personal pantheon of hobgoblins. I was scared that he would break into my home and subject me to some unspeakable horror. (I don’t know what that horror would have been; singing School’s out for summer, I expect.) I went so far as to bow my head while in the toilet, convinced that that would prevent Alice from identifying me, and whisking me away to some sort of un-education camp.

I’m pretty sure you couldn’t pull that kind of stunt these days. It truly was a more innocent time.