Month: August 2016

… I guess it’s just me then.

I’m not interested in what Quora Inc. thinks about comments blocking; if Quora Inc. had its way, there would be no comments, and Quora certainly does not think comments are a big part of the desired user experience.

It seems a lot of users agree that Quora comment blockers should get to comment. Because:

• tit for tat blocking would only exacerbate the situation, and is retributive justice (Robin Corey, Koyel Bandyopadhyay)
• comment blockers should be given the benefit of the doubt as to why they block comments (Koyel Bandyopadhyay, McKayla Kennedy, Bart Loews), and should not be penalised as a group (Heather Jedrus): I don’t want anyone blocked (McKayla Kennedy)
• comments are not the proper venue for disagreement; answers or downvotes or reporting are (Koyel Bandyopadhyay, Amanda Glover, Craig Good); and as Quora keeps saying, comments aren’t encouraged, and Quora is not for debate (Jon Sanchez, Amanda Glover)
• comment blockers are intrinsically allowed to comment on others, because that’s what they want to do (Miguel Paraz, Jean-Baptiste Bertrand); block them if you don’t like it (Viktor Toth, Mohan Vanamalai, Cameron Williams, Lara Novakov, Marcus Sheldon Brandt)
• You can always engage with me in messages instead of comments (Viktor Toth, Mohan Vanamalai)

Only a few respondents acknowledged an inherent discomfort with comment blockers commenting (Cameron Williams, Marcus Sheldon Brandt, Heather Jedrus, Robin Corey)—including the two comment blockers themselves (Viktor Toth, Mohan Vanamalai).

Well, I would rather the option of disabling comments from comment-blockers, and I certainly decline upvotes to comment-blockers. Of course, Quora UI being what it is, I don’t get options—things are either on or off universally. So I will just continue to shun comment blockers.

• I have no interest in engaging in an anechoic chamber; if Quora killed comments (as they’d have preferred), I’d leave, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
• It’s not just justice that’s retributive: morality is foundationally dependent on reciprocity. That’s the notion we call “fairness”.
• Comment blockers may have whatever motivation they want for blocking comments: but if they take away all possibility of reciprocity, they get no engagement from me, and I fundamentally mistrust any comments they leave for anyone.
• Bart Loews’ distinction is one I find specious: “This doesn’t mean that they’re refusing to advance conversation, often it’s just that they’ve received a disproportionate amount of hate and are looking to stem it off because they’re tired of deleting the same played out comments over and over again.” In doing the latter, they are also doing the former.
• If you think private messages are going to encourage more civility than publicly visible comments, and you encourage private message instead of comments… well, you have enough confidence in human nature, that I’m surprised you’re blocking comments at all.
• Reporting would assume that I have confidence and trust in Quora moderation.
• I have resorted to answers instead of comments once or twice, when I had enough to say to warrant a competing answer (or when the competing answerer saw fit to block me). Given how downgraded comments are, they are a necessary alternative, and I acknowledge the usefulness of a retorting answer rather than a bogged down debate in comments.

At least six times. My wife is addicted.

I howl whenever she tries to put it on. After the first three times through, you see through all the faults. I end up watching anyway if it’s a good season.

(2nd in particular; and 5th because Josh Fricking Lyman gets at least some comeuppance. I must have been the only fan of Ryan Pierce, for that reason.)

Yes, although you won’t be surprised to hear that the change in the usual Columbo formula comes in the later telemovies, which tried to play with the format.

Unsurprisingly, Columbo gets it wrong in the episode called Columbo Cries Wolf (TV Episode 1990). It’s the one with the Hugh Hefner knockoff.

He gets it right in the end, of course. It is still Columbo.

A most commendable question; and you’d think a Greek dialectologist would be ideally placed to answer this.

You would be wrong. Precisely because I’m used to dialects, it’s hard for me to make aesthetic judgements on them.

But let me attempt to at least posit why certain dialects might be considered harsh.

1. Cappadocian

It’s doubtful that most Greeks have ever even heard Cappadocian. Cappadocian is moribund, Cappadocians never had the numbers that Pontians had in Greece, and many Cappadocians had already shifted to Turkish before the population exchanges. So the full extent of my experience of what Cappadocian sounds like is the “Anatolian” (from Kayseri) in the 1830s dialect comedy Babel.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=M7P7mXegdXU

The Anatolian is introduced at 5:30, and yes, the very first thing he asks for is pastırma kayserili.

I’m guessing that Cappadocian will sound harsh to Greeks, because it sounds Turkish: language contact was most advanced there (even to the extent in places of vowel harmony). At an impressionistic level, it’s quite breathy, and the /a/ is back.

Then again, this recording of Pharasa [Çamlıca, Yahyalı] speakers in Greece doesn’t sound anywhere near as harsh as the music hall stereotype:

The other Anatolian dialect Pontic, by contrast, does not sound particularly harsh to me. At least, I don’t think so. Because the intonation really does soak in from the prestige language. Contrast below a newscast in Pontic in Greece (which sounds identical to Athens newscaster Greek), and a Russian Pontian speaker (who sounds, well, Russian):

EDIT: Just got this recording of Silli dialect (near Konya). Not unpleasant, but not very Greek-sounding, either:

2. Northern Greek

Northern Greek doesn’t sound particularly guttural or abrupt, but it is missing a lot of vowels. That makes it sound, at least, crunchy.

Here’s an interview with someone from Lesbos.

3. Assibilating dialects Greek

Assibilation is the process whereby non-sibilants become sibilants; in particular, tsitakismos (as the Greeks call it) is the subset of that process, whereby front [c] goes to a sibilant like [tʃ] or [tɕ]; palatalisation also made [s] go to [ʃ] in a lot of dialects.

Standard Greek doesn’t have Postalveolar consonants, and I’d fancy that any dialect that does have them would sound harsh to Standard Greek speakers.

That’s most dialects of Greek. Cretan, Cypriot, most Northern dialects, Pontic, Cappadocian, Italiot.

3. Standard Greek

Or at least, Peloponnesian, which is what Standard Greek is based on.

Ha! The rapid-fire intonation is what I have in mind. I don’t know for a fact what Standard Greek sounded like to Cretans or Cypriots when they first heard it, before they associated it with officialdom. But given how sing-song Cretan and Cypriot is, I imaging “harsh” would be one word.

The last Greek-ish state to fall to the Ottoman Empire was the Principality of Theodoro, in 1475. You know of it as Gothia: it’s in the Crimea, where Gothic survived to be recorded in the 16th century, before yielding to Greek. The Greek of the Crimea in turn survives as Mariupol Greek.

But the Principality of Theodoro was not a Byzantine outpost; it started as part of the Empire of Trebizond, before becoming autonomous. The Empire of Trebizond, which held out until August 1461, started out claiming to be a successor state of the East Roman Empire, after the Fourth Crusade. The Empire of Nicaea and the Despotate of Epirus did too. But Nicaea was the empire that ended up taking Constantinople back; so its claim was the claim that counted. And, Wikipedia informs me,

In 1282, John II Komnenos stripped off his imperial regalia before the walls of Constantinople before entering to marry Michael’s daughter and accept his legal title of despot. However, his successors used a version of his title, “Emperor and Autocrat of the entire East, of the Iberians and the Perateia” until the Empire’s end in 1461.

So it depends on whether, by Byzantine, you mean “part of the empire calling itself Roman, and whose capital was Constantinople”; “successor state of the pre-1204 Roman Empire whose capital was Constantinople”; or “state whose official language was Greek”. I don’t feel comfortable calling a state Byzantine if it doesn’t have Byzantium.

Now, the Byzantine Empire in 1453 consisted of Constantinople and a bit of the Peloponnese, around Mystras. The Despotate of the Morea was a province of the Byzantine Empire, that remained in Greek hands past 1453, under Demetrios Palaiologos and Thomas Palaiologos, brothers of Constantine XI. Not that they called themselves emperors after 1453, and not that they did much keeping of the Morea in Greek hands: they invited the Ottomans in to subdue a revolt by Albanians, right after the fall of Constantinople: Morea revolt of 1453–54

Mehmed had enough when the Palaiologos brothers started fighting each other. Mystras surrendered to Mehmed the Conqueror in 1460. The very last fortress of the Despotate, Salmeniko Castle, held out until July 1461 under Graitzas Palaiologos.

I don’t want to dignify the post-1453 Despotate of the Morea with the name Byzantine; but unlike Theodoro and Trebizond, there really isn’t anything else to call it. And Thomas Palaiologos was recognised in the West as the rightful heir of the Byzantine Empire.

So, thanks Dimitris Sotiropoulos, for the question: I learned something new today!

Not satisfied completely with any of the answers, though C.S. Friedman and Michael Alvis are closer to my thinking, and Mack Moore and Kalo Miles are further.

Celia is closest in her initial formulation (which Michael does not contradict):

Opposites are paired items *in the same conceptual category*, with perfectly opposing (non-overlapping) qualities. To be one is to not be the other.

But the qualities not being overlapping is the most prototypical instance of opposition; you can have opposites on a cline, where there is no clear dividing line. The most clear instance of that is big and small, which are entirely subjective qualities (big and small relative to what?), and which are on a sorites scale (how many centimetres do you add to a dog’s height before it turns from small to big?)

So the fact that there is a cline of age, from infant to girl to maiden to woman to crone, is irrelevant. A woman can still be the opposite of a girl, particularly if we isolate the conceptual category as being not age, but (as Michael identified) womanhood, whether that is female + adulthood, or sexual maturity, or any of the murkier cultural constructs associated with girlhood and womanhood.

Mack’s notion that

The concept of “opposite” is geometric, geographic, or mathematical, not linguistic nor conceptual. In the observable world, few things have any actual opposite.

… well, I’ll just say that no linguist uses opposite in that extremely restrictive sense, and no layperson did either. If they did, big and small would not be opposites, because big and small are entirely conceptual and not geometric concepts (since they are subjective and contextual).

And “I’m an individual, I’m not a construct, you can’t put me in a pigeonhole”—that’s wishful thinking. Binary categories are how we understand the world. Intersex or queer individuals challenge the universal applicability of the binary category of gender; they don’t undo everyone else’s acceptance of that cultural construct for themselves.

I don’t like Michael’s answer, because I think the native speaker’s understanding of “opposite of girl” is far less refined most of the time. (It is, after all, a lay understanding.) But he is closer than Celia, in identifying that the conceptual category that the oppositeness is defined on is contextual, and in identifying several conceptual categories that it is aligned to.

If the context is sexual maturity, or adulthood, or other murkily related stuff, the opposite of girl is woman.

If the context is gender, the opposite of girl is boy.

By default? I’d say by default the opposite of girl is boy. There’s a reason Kalo Miles jumped to it. If for no other reason, because if you want to emphasise someone’s non-adulthood rather than their female gender, you don’t say “she’s only a girl!” You say “she’s only a child!”

EDIT: Oh, and the opposite wouldn’t be girls: we don’t consider inflection as making an opposite of a word. Opposites involve stems. Dictionary words, if you like. Baked in meaning.

I had to correct your spelling there: πεις, not πες.

In the context you’ve given, both are subjunctives, following μη “don’t”. Λες is the present subjunctive, meaning it’s imperfective (continuous); πεις is the aorist subjunctive (perfective). So “don’t keep telling me” vs “don’t tell me” (once-off).

Why would the lyricist switch aspect in the verb? Variety: he gets to say the same thing in the chorus twice, but with a different rhyme:

http://www.stixoi.info/stixoi.ph…

Μεγάλα λόγια μη μου λες
όσα ακούω τα ξανάκουσα τόσες φορές
Μεγάλα λόγια μη μου πεις
μείνε και τίποτα μη μου υποσχεθείς

Don’t keep telling me big words.
What I’m hearing I’ve heard so many times before.
Don’t tell me big words.
Stay and promise me nothing.

I’ve read Dimitris M Papadakis’ response, and I’m quite happy to vehemently disagree with him. And of course…

Many modern Greek citizens may, of course claim otherwise, but there ought to be a distinction between those who happen to be Greek citizens and those who have a Greek mind and adhere to a Greek, that is genuinely “hellenic”, worldview.

… the disagreement is all about whether Modern Greek identity can admit any “oriental” element at all, or whether all Greek popular culture should have impeccably classical credentials.

Not a Tsifteteli

Possibly a bit closer to a Tsifteteli

The dance is certainly an innovation in Greece, and appears to have been come about with rebetiko music. While there are some elements to rebetiko that were indigenous to Greece, the major impetus for it came with refugees from Asia Minor, and tsifteteli similarly reflects Asia Minor popular culture. The claims of Byzantine or Ancient Greek antecedents are pretty blatant stretching.

It’s fair to say that the tsifteteli is low culture; word association with tsifteteli will bring up skyladiko “dog pound”, the low rent brash bouzouki joints out of town.

In my book, that’s just fine. There’s a prudishness in Greek folk culture (folk song outside of Cyprus does not acknowledge women have bodies—except for during carnival, when they only acknowledge they have bodies). The self-consciously sensuous dancing of the tsifteteli is something I find a welcome antidote to it.

Yes, it’s a dance starlets use to show off:

But notice, the cool young male thing to the left is having just as good a time of it.

One of the oddities of tsifteteli is that, quite often, it’s women that end up dancing it with each other. Not necessarily because they’re flirting with each other; more like, there isn’t enough critical mass of men feeling unselfconscious enough to join them. Which in any case means there’s a little more going on than:

None whatsoever beyond entertainment and flirting or lusting over the female body in front of you.

… and, really, they said the same about waltzes.

Well, Lyonel Perabo mon vieux, this is going to be an unimaginative answer, but thanks for asking.

• University education: Bachelor of Electrical Engineering
• Well, no electricity, so that’s irrelevant. Good, I hated engineering.
• University education: Bachelor of Computer Science
• … No computers either. And too much damn competition from all the other time travelling geeks.
• University education: Masters in Cognitive Science
• Dude, you can’t get a job with that now
• University education: Doctorate in Linguistics
• Quite apart from the woe is me of Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your personal experience with obtaining a linguistics degree? …

Well, let’s think about it. 1516, Crete and Cyprus were both under Venetian rule. They were colonial outposts, but the Renaissance was starting to make an impression there: there were Petrarchan sonnets in Cypriot, and literary societies in Crete. (The best of Cretan literature was still a century down the road.)

If I was a city dweller and/or Catholic, I’d have access to Renaissance learning. I’d probably write even worse Latin poetry than I write here to Michael Masiello, and I might get a gig in Venice. Aldus Manutius has just died, but I hear they’re still hiring Classical Greek proofreaders.

If I were a villager and Orthodox, there would be two paths for someone through book learning. The clergy would be one, and I think my chanting would be passable, as demonstrated here.

The other would be as a notary. I could have abysmal spelling in Greek, codeswitching with Italian for every third word. And five centuries down the road, some poor shmuck working in a digital library of Ancient and Mediaeval Greek would be tweaking their morphological analyser, to deal with the mess I’d bequeathed them.

I’m going to miss you, Manolis Varouchas.

From Klimt’s Two Adeles: The Bloch-Bauer Paintings: Adele I is on permanent display in the Neue Galerie, and Adele II is on permanent loan to the Museum of Modern Art. I can’t find the status of the other three.