Month: February 2016

Some good answers here.

There are two answers to the question.

The wrong answer (though the one I prefer) is: what are some not very minimalist pieces, which I will enjoy listening to as someone unfamiliar with the style?

The answer to that includes some of my favourite 20th century pieces:

• Most things John Adams did in the 1980s, up to Nixon in China, which was his farewell to minimalism
• Philip Glass’ Akhnaten
• Steve Reich’s Tehilim

The problem with that is, you’re not really learning minimalism that way.

The right answer is to do what I did in my early 20s. Strap yourself in a chair, put on a true minimalist piece, and DO NOT MOVE until you get into it. The ones I used were:

• Steve Reich’s Violin Phase
• Philip Glass’ Einstein On The Beach

Even more basic than that, Steve Reich’s Clapping.

Noone here’s mentioning the Holy Minimalists, Pärt and Tavener. That’s probably right.

EDIT: No, Pärt’s been mentioned…

Hm, question with assumptions much?

Note that:

• The Roman Empire was not a Gene Rodenberry Humanist utopia. It was fertile ground for all manner of (as the Roman sceptics would have put it) strange cults from the East, and it certainly had not turned away from religion in any meaningful sense.
• Lucian derided many of these cults in his Passing of Peregrinus and Alexander the False Prophet (including a very early and somewhat confused mention of Christians) ; that tells you that they prospered.
• Lucian was in the elite, and his scepticism was very much an exception. (He made Greek mythology sound absurd, too; and it’s very hard for us to recover the sense of awe that the myths originally had.) Christianity, like other new religions, took root among the disenfranchised Greek-speaking masses.
• As religions went, Christianity was not more absurd-looking than whatever else was on offer in the Empire. It was absurd-looking from the perspective of post-Temple Judaism; but it has been argued that what made it absurd to Jews is what made it plausible to Gentiles (divine birth, relaxation of Mosaic law).

You mean, US and Canadian accents sound different?

After three years of living in the States, I was *almost* able to tell Mid-West and North-East apart. I only know to listen out for the “aboot” vowel because of South Park. (And imagine my surprise when I heard the same vowel shift in Southern Virginia.)

Americans have a devil of a time telling Australian and New Zealand accents apart. Same on the flip side. It’s all about familiarity.

Or aboot even.

Notwithstanding Brian’s legitimate objection (https://www.quora.com/unanswered… ), I’ll bite:

Polish?

Vertices.

Why? Because the word is straight of out Latin, and Latin has a lot of declensions that look weird from the perspective of English.

In particular, the plural vertices suggests that the singular should be vertix, just like the singular of matrices is matrix. There are a lot of –ices plurals corresponding to –ex singulars in Latin thoough, and historical linguists mumble something about analogy and/or vowel reduction. Sihler’s New Comparative Grammar p. 67 is my source for the mumblings.

Why use the Latin vertices rather than a regular vertexes? Because (a) vertex is a learnèd, rare word; (b) vertex is a word straight out of Latin, that never really was assimilated into English; (c) even common Latin words following the –ex -ices pattern don’t readily get regularised into English, precisely because –ex is so redolent of Latin.

We say indexes now, but we still say indices too; it’s the more common meaning of index, as what’s in the back of a book, that gets the English indexes plural.

For having had an alarm clock loaned to him by Annika Schauer, I understand…

For more details on this seminal event see:

When and how did Annika Schauer loan Jimmy Carter an alarm clock? 

where the endings “-tion” and “-tio” both were in use.

Alack, not so.

The Latin ending is nominative –tio, genitive –tionis,  dative –tioni, accusative –tionem, ablative –tione.

That’s a pain, sure, but the common pattern is that the underlying ending seems to be –tion– (and that’s what you’d reconstruct the proto-Latin nominative as). The nominative drops the final –n since there’s nothing after it, since Latin doesn’t normally have final –n‘s; that’s what makes a lot of Latin declensions look inconsistent (and even more Greek ones). 

When the Latin case system melted down, speakers went with the regularity they could see, and reduced it all to –tione (Italian) or –tion (Old French). English got its Latin from Old French. And it did not have the option of getting them without the final -n, straight from Latin.

Much more recent loans straight from Latin will take them as –tio ; the only one I can think of though is fellatio. And the taboo nature of it probably explains why it wasn’t Francified to *fellation: it was not so much a borrowing, as a way of hiding the meaning, so it wasn’t a real English word.

So…

What would happen if you went back and switched –tion to –tio?

It’s an odd thing in English to have words ending in –o; that’s not an English thing, it’s an Italian and  Spanish thing (see List words ending with io ). It’s an Italian and Spanish thing precisely because it’s not a French thing—French aggressively dropped final vowels (-tione > -tion; *bono > bon). You couldn’t switch tion to –tio in isolation back then; you’d have to make sure all those final vowels were kept in general, because if you didn’t, people would make –tio sound like something more familiar. Like say –ty (which comes from Latin –tia).

To make that work in turn, you’d basically have to have English borrow words from  Italian or Spanish instead of French. Words like braggadocio and machismo would be closer to the norm than the exception. And as an added bonus, English would sound even less Germanic.

Opera singers would be grateful.

Greece was an Eastern country in 1832, and has been telling itself ever since that it’s a Western country. (That’s what the Westerners were telling her too. At least, to her face.)

By the 1990s, Greece was a Western country. But the Eastern roots are still there.

When the switchover between East and West happened is hard to answer. I think it’s the 1980s, others might think it was the 1880’s.

There’s been a lot of talk here on Quora about Greeks calling themselves Roman (Ρωμιός). The Hellene/Roman dichotomy is the Western/Eastern dichotomy.

Yup. Close to the dialect of Genoa, which Monaco sits next to: Monégasque dialect.

There’s been some promotion of Monegasque recently, but Monaco isn’t in the right part of the world for promoting small languages. The Duchy of Savoy (in the same general area, and homeland of Franco-Provençal/Arpitan) made French its official language three years before France did, and 300 years before they became part of France.

Hm. In this subculture, sure. Adage at least, if not proverb.

The fragmentation of culture in the Anglosphere, and the lack of common cultural reference points as a result, is a strange thing. It feels unprecedented. You can’t fall back on common literary references any more. The Anglosphere thinks traditional wisdom is old hat and values innovation; so proverbs are derided as cliches (a big difference from say Greekdom). You can fall back on pop songs and movies to some extent, but only to some extent, because of the fragmentation.

So in this culture, memes fill a function. They are visual, because the communication enables it. Maybe not completely unprecedented; there’s lots of coded memes in Renaissance painting, for example. But yeah, they’re a proverb of the future.