Nick on Quora

On seeing this question, I thought, “Huh? Why is this not a question for Wikipedia?”

And then I looked at Wikipedia—English and German and French; and I realised that it’s not as trivial a question as you might think.

The last three letters of the Coptic alphabet listed on Wikipedia (all three languages) are Ϭ, Ϯ, Ⳁ.

The French and English article on Wikipedia starts with this image:

In this image, that last Ⳁ is missing.

The third last letter, tshēma Ϭ, is a straightforward letter, derived from Demotic Egyptian. It is transliterated as <q> or <tsh>, and pronounced as [kʲ] or [tʃ].

The second last letter, ti Ϯ, is also from Demotic. It is pronounced as [ti] in Sahidic, and [de] in Boharic.

Now, this will immediately throw most people. Coptic grammars calmly say that several letters are equivalents of two other letters: ⲑ is /th/, ⲝ is /ks/, and so forth. But /ti/ is different. If Coptic is an alphabet, then its letters are meant to be either consonants or vowels, but not both. [ti] is not something you find in an alphabet, it is something you find in a syllabary.

The Demotic script that the letter originates, though, was not an alphabet: it was an abjad (consonant-only) script, which meant that single letters often could end up standing for syllables. That ended up happening with ti. And all accounts of Coptic list ti as a normal letter. So a letter it is, even if it is not the kind of letter you expect in an alphabet.

The final letter, Ⳁ, does not have a name or a pronunciation. It is a numeral, with the value 900.

Coptic, like Greek, Hebrew, and (early) Cyrillic, used a different letter of the alphabet for each of 1–9, 10–90, and 100–900. That requires 27 letters. In the case of Greek, which had 24 letters, the numerals for 6, 90 and 900 were represented by archaic letters, that were not considered part of the alphabet normally: ϛ Ϟ Ϡ. Coptic had no shortage of letters, but it still was reluctant to assign numeric values to Demotic letters, as opposed to letters that came from Greek; so it added ⲋ for 6, reused the ϥ for 90 as the letter fai /f/, and came up with Ⳁ for 900.

Does Ⳁ actually count as a letter? The precedent of Greek says no. Alphabet copte — Wikipédia refers to it as a “abbreviating ligature”, which would say no. Coptic numerals only are in common use in the later Boiharic dialect; the earlier Sahidic dialect did not use them, so that is a vote against as well. And the two Sahidic grammars I’ve had a look at, Johanna Brankaer’s and Bentley Layton’s, do not give Ⳁ as a letter. Layton doesn’t even mention Ⳁ until his discussion of numerals.

Wikipedia and Unicode list Ⳁ as a letter of the Coptic alphabet, because they have to list it somewhere; but in the normal Coptic understanding of “alphabet”, Ⳁ isn’t part of it. The atypical ti Ϯ is it.

Nestor’s Cup is one of the earliest inscriptions in Greek, and it’s got a metrical inscription that may allude to the Iliad:

So it’s feasible that Homer started being transcribed as soon as vowels were introduced—which pretty much was as soon as the alphabet was adopted in Greek. (We have no evidence of Greek using Phoenecian letters without vowels, and vowels were as much as anything a misconstrual of how Phoenician worked.)

The Iliad seems to have been written at roughly the time the alphabet was introduced, and writing is mentioned in passing in the Iliad: The “Fatal Letter” in the Iliad: Introduction of Written Language to the Greeks (Circa 750 BCE). But it’s likelier that Homer really was first written down when the Greeks said that Homer was first written down, two centuries later in Athens; oral transmission would have kept it around till then, and from what little we know, there was a lot of textual variation about, outside of the version that was written down.

The way I did it, which may not work everywhere, is:

• Take as many breadth subjects in linguistics as you can, while doing your degree in another faculty.
• Demonstrate through charm and wit and intellect that you would be an asset to the linguistics department.
• If at all possible, do a cross disciplinary postgraduate degree that somehow bridges the gap between the two faculties. In my case, it was a masters in cognitive science.
• Of course, back in my day, interdisciplinary degrees were fashionable; not sure they are still.
• Failing that, see if you can work out an accelerated or diploma course to bridge the gap.
• The more brilliant you show yourself to be, and the more slack your University administration is, the less hoops you will have to jump through to bridge the gap.
• Again: university administrations are not as slack as they used to be .
• All this presupposes that money is no object. If you’re in the States, my best advice would be to get a membership to a university library… 😐

Interesting set of answers to date, which surface a bunch of different attitudes:

• The Old Planter: “I’d get on the phone and ask what the hell are you doing to me.” It would not even occur to the peasantry to get on the phone. The peasantry are not convinced that moderators are human beings that breathe the same air they do. It helps, I presume, to have met Quora staff face to face.
• The Loyalist: “Quora does not do bad things for no reason, and I trust I will be vindicated.” There’s a bunch of users who don’t have that level of trust. It helps, I presume, to have met Quora staff face to face.
• The Wronged: “That’s all too likely, given what I’ve experienced here. I’d accept it, and I wouldn’t be that surprised.”
• The Take-It-Or-Leave-It: “Meh, a distraction that’s had its time, there’s a world beyond. More fools they.”
• The Content-Proud: “For God’s sake, at least let me back on so I can archive my writings.” (Good news: they do.)

Two consistent themes emerge though:

• I would not come back under a new identity. In fact, I would not come back at all. (As an exception, Dan, I see, would ask for reinstatement after 6 months or a year. I wonder if anyone’s ever been unbanned after that long. And I wonder if anyone who has not met Quora staff face to face would expect as much.)
• Quora will have violated an implicit contract with me, and would have lost my good will. (Assuming they had it.) Which is a large part of the reason why I wouldn’t come back.

I’ll note that there are people I know who have been banished, fairly or no, and who have come back under false identities. So the first theme is not universally held. I’d say that the second is universally held though: in the instances I know of in regard to returnees, they certainly don’t sing Quora’s praises behind its back.

(And no, I am not going to report them. As I’ve said already: Quora is entitled to demand my compliance to their regulations, but not to demand my enforcement of them on others.)

For my part?

• I would feel even more betrayed. Incandescently betrayed.
• I would republish my content (which I still own) elsewhere, taking a leaf out of Clarissa Lohr’s answer to What would happen if comments feature in Quora was removed and all existing comments simply vanished into thin air?.
• At that elsewhere (presumably my own blog), I would violate BNBR loudly and often. And proudly.
• My sense of betrayal would certainly outweigh my sense of community: I would not make up an identity and come back. Not out of respect for Quora’s Terms Of Service, but out of my own self-respect. Which ultimately should count for more.

… but Greek Language – A Stack Exchange Proposal has certainly piqued my interest.

Expect plenty of cross-polination between my posts here and there if it gets up. (Unless that’s verboten over there; Stack Exchange I gather is pretty rigid.)

1. Because so many Latin nouns do: Why do so many Latin words end in “-um” or “-us”?
2. Because Latin tended by default to treat place names as normal nouns, and ensure they could be inflected as normal nouns: it linguistically assimilated them if they were not originally Latin.

Ain’t – Wikipedia

Ain’t is found throughout the English-speaking world across regions and classes, and is among the most pervasive nonstandard terms in English. It is one of two negation features (the other being the double negative) that are known to appear in all nonstandard English dialects.

Take ain’t instead of am/are not, add the double negative, and you’ve got ain’t no. Neither are features of Standard English; both, alone or in combination, are features of pretty much all nonstandard English.

Of the two, amn’t, aren’t > an’t > ain’t happened in the 17th and 18th century—certainly in time for it to travel everywhere English is spoken; ain’t is first attested in writing in 1749 per Wikipedia. The Double negative was present in Middle English, and in wide use in the 17th century. (“Up to the 18th century, double negatives were used to emphasise negation.”)

From what I’m seeing in Wikipedia, both ain’t and the double negative were attacked at the same time by prescription. But they were English-wide phenomena; their association with African American English is simply because African American English was somewhat less subject to prescription than white variants of the language.

Australians desperately hang on to the small lexical differences between States, as you’ll see here, because otherwise Australian English is ludicrously homogeneous geographically. Variation in Australian English – Wikipedia

The names for different sizes of beer glasses (Australian English vocabulary – Wikipedia) is kind of the counterpart to the renowned Eskimo words for snow. (Yes, the jokes do write themselves.) And there is bizarre State-based variation, just as there was beer parochialism in the days before craft beer.

There used to be a similar diversity of words for uncouth and unsophisticated people (yes, again the jokes do write themselves); but they have all been replaced now by Bogan, which has now also come to be reclaimed as a positive.

Where Australia specialises words about beer glasses, Greece specialises words about souvlaki. A döner kebab is a gyros in the South; in the north it’s a sanduits.

The other shibboleth of Northern vs Southern Greek vocabulary is the word for ‘on the ground’. Northern Greek uses the word kato ‘down’ for ‘on the ground’ as well; Southern Greek has retained khamo, khamu for the latter—earning them the moniker khamudzides ‘Down-On-The-Grounders’ from northerners.

See this post on a recent book about the slang differences between the two, written by Haralambos Metaxas, who is also a contributor to the Greek equivalent of Urban Dictionary, slang.gr

Recall the old, old answer by the then head of Reddit: Yishan Wong’s answer to Why are my questions not answered on Quora?

The fact that it’s a Q&A format is just a hook to make it easier for people to start writing.

Quora is a great place to write answers and to read answers, but it is not a good place to get your own questions answered.

It is true that disregarding the intent of a questioner is, under normal circumstances, assholery. Yes, so are troll questions; but troll questions are not a get-out-of-jail card for this rather idiosyncratic attitude. The attitude is best motivated by this:

Anil Mitra’s answer to Questions on Quora don’t “belong” to the person who asked them, but shouldn’t it matter that the original asker gets a satisfactory answer?

If a sincere questioner wants Quorans to respond to their intent, they should state their intent directly. This does not always happen. But if, in stating their intent directly, they limit the scope of their question they are limiting the usefulness of the site.

The premise of Quora is not answering questions, it’s treating questions as springboards for formulating knowledge. Questions people actually need narrow and usable answers to, with a time limit no less, are not the kinds of question that will get much joy here. They’re not what Quora is looking for, and they haven’t cultivated the kind of community that would answer in those terms.

But still. That’s no excuse for not trying to work out what the OP’s intent was in good faith, and dismissing their intent; Quora policy in fact dictates this. Phrases such as “this is obviously a troll question” are in fact reportable under BNBR. (How widely is that known?)

The satisfaction of the person matters; if they follow up and say, “what I was actually after was…”, I will engage with them. But the way Quora is set up, it’s not mandatory; I have in fact sometimes said that I would ignore the specifics of a question’s details to give a more general answer.

Great answer from Roman Huczok: see Roman Huczok’s answer.

Getting an undeciphered text with no Rosetta stone is, as Roman said, hard work, though not impossible. The question is after the peculiarities of Lojban which would make the decipherment harder—particularly given the whole exoticism that Lojban claims to, of encoding predicate logic as something quite alien to human language.

I’ll retort that the way actual humans use it, the predicate logic component is not that big a deal: you can still clearly see human verbs behind it. (The way Lojban predicates avoid raising by default is somewhat more odd.)

I’ll suggest the following as things that would trip up a would-be decipherer:

• The compounding morphology of Lojban—which is both its derivational morphology and its compounding proper—is eccentric: lots of three-letter reduced forms, which only occasionally remind you of their original five-letter predicates. The decipherer will easily tell that they are a distinct word class because of their phonotactics, but working out that they are compounds will take longer.
• The terminators—the spoken bracketing of Lojban—are not a human language thing, and the conditions of ambiguity which make them optional aren’t human either. A decipherer might work out that they coocurr with certain syntactic structures, but would be likelier to construe them as attitudinals (modal particles).
• Because of Lojban’s stick-them-in-a-blender approach to the core predicates, the tools of historical linguistics or inspection will be pretty useless in deciphering them. In fact, apart from le, la, lo, na, mi, I don’t think inspection would yield up anything.
• The use of numbered predicate places instead of prepositions—the tritransitive and quadritransitive predicates, the strategies for rearranging arguments, the relative paucity of actual prepositions—would throw a decipherer as well.