Month: September 2016

I humbly thank Amy Dakin for her A2A, but I am a dunce as to Ancient Greek religion. I’ll note one odd thing though.

I’m not sure of this one thing, and I’m happy to be shown to be wrong.

In a few questions, I tackled the question of “what’s with the meaning of agape”, by going to the Diccionario Griego–Español as Ground Zero for the latest definitions not overly coloured by Christian theology. See Nick Nicholas’ answer to In the New Testament, what different semantic shades can the verb agapao (“love”) take?

Now, I noticed an odd thing with agape. It could be directed to pagan deities or the Christian deity; but as a noun, it is not attested before the Koine; and in particular, it is addressed towards “Oriental” or Egyptian deities, rather than native Greek or Roman deities. The verb agapaō is also plentifully applied to God in the Septuagint.

And in fact, the nominalisation agape itself is no earlier than the Septuagint.

Now, this could be coincidence, and I’m happy to be corrected; but I don’t see clear evidence that the Ancients used either agapaō or phileō (or philia) to refer to their attitude toward the Gods. On the contrary, I see Aristotle, Topica 105a, pose the question “whether or not one should honour (τιμᾶν) the gods and love (ἀγαπᾶν) one’s parents”.

My suspicion, then, based on superficial knowledge, is that the Greek gods inspired awe or reverence, but not love; that feeling love towards a god was a Hellenistic, Jewish, and Christian thing.

Quite apart from whether it’s a well written article or not, James Fallows is not just some random Quoran posting punditry in his PJs eating Cheetos.

Well, he may do that too; but Fallows is a journalist and writer of long standing in the mainstream media, who I enjoy seeing on late night Australian TV now and again; and I enjoyed reading his work in The Atlantic, back in the days before Quora became the only site I read. Since he’s a mainstream journalist, he gets immediate name recognition as an outside-of-Quora writer; and I wouldn’t be surprised if Quora (which had invited his answer in a Session) pushed his answer along to get more views.

Sierra Spaulding, I’m taking it from here:

On smelly things: the evolutionary account I’ve seen is, to transmit smells of interest back to the den, to keep the other canines informed. All interpretations of dogs as wolves in dens, of course, you should read with caution. And the answers to Why do dogs sniff the grass and suddenly start rolling their bodies over it? have a rather different take.

Like Shannon Gilles said: to submit, and thence to ask for belly rubs. When Jenny the annoying lab–kelpie mix with abandonment issues switches from exposing her belly

to wiggling insistently (as if she’s found some delectable animal corpse, only she’s on porcelain tiles in Schloss Nicholas, which were laid down before I inherited a canine), and sticking out her dodgy leg, then we believe she is demanding not so much a belly rub, as a leg rub.

Yes, the fricking dog gets leg rubs. Why do you ask?

Original wording: Which dialect (hesitate to call it that) of Greek is being used in this translation of the Iliad?

You do well, my synonomatos [fellow Nick], to hesitate: “dialect” is not quite the right thing to call it.

This is the 1904 translation of the Iliad by Alexandros Pallis. A Liverpudlian Greek like our very own Kelley Spartiatis.

What would you call it? If you’re talking to Greeks, Psycharist Demotic. You could call it Longhair Demotic or Extreme Demotic; but then I’d have to slap you.

If you’re not talking to Greeks, Early Demotic. Where Demotic Greek is not the vernacular of Modern Greece per se, but the codification of vernacular Greek as a standard language.

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When people were initially writing in the vernacular in the 19th century, they were just writing in their dialect; you can say that of the Ionian island writers such as Solomos and Polylas.

The first generation of demoticists, advocates for the vernacular as the basis for the standard language of Greece, were led by Ioannis Psycharis. The language he advocated for was purist, in that he rejected morphological and phonetic compromises with the archaic norm Katharevousa. And in that first iteration of a written normalised vernacular (dismissed by the establishment as “longhair”, the same way the later hippies were), Psycharis and his followers took the opportunity to do some orthographical simplification, making spelling more phonetic. Which is what you’re seeing in the translation.

I wouldn’t sneer. The spelling of the vernacular took a while to settle down; and there has been a resurgence of phonetic simplification in the last few decades. I was taught τραίνο and αυγό, for example. I’m pretty sure you were taught τρένο and αβγό. And Nick Nicholas’ answer to How is “o po po” written in Greek?

The next generation’s version of Demotic, led by Triantafyllidis and Tzartzanos, is the version that prevailed (more or less). It made a lot more concessions to Katharevousa, and Psycharis dismissed it with his magnificently Demotic word for “half-way”, μεσοβέζικη. But Psycharis was in Paris and Pallis was in Liverpool; Triantafyllidis and Tzartzanos were in Greece, writing the school textbooks, and they had a much better sense of what was feasible within Greece.

While standard demotic did not go the way Psycharis had hoped, literary Demotic stayed closer to the rural ideal for another generation; it was only after WWII that literature made itself comfortable in what was an urban language. So if you read Greek literature from 1900 through 1950, Pallis’ translation should not sound utterly alien, though it will sound like it has the folksy dial up to 11.

Hence the second declension modernisation of Apollo and Agamemnon as Απόλλος and Αγαμέμνος, the phonetic spelling of the genitive of Leto as Λητός, the now dialectal (and metrically convenient) plural genitive οπλαρχηγώνε, the phonetic spelling of “two” as διο and “that” as αφτός.

There’s a little bit of awkwardness in the versification, but I like it.

The microservice instance I’m involved with has switched from Kafka to NATS. Our main reason for that was (a) native support of Golang, and (b) flakiness in Zookeper. Zookeper is not Kafka’s fault, but it was getting to be a problem for us.

• Who owns the copyright on content contributed to Quora?
• How can material on Quora be reused elsewhere? What are the licensing terms? What about in the case where a user has selected the “not for reproduction” option?

The other answers are right, but the links contain the official Quora policy: copyright resides with the authors, and the authors, per the terms of service

retain ownership of all Content you submit, post, display, or otherwise make available on the Service.

Quora’s licence to use your content is expressly non-exclusive.

Will Lesbians and Gays go extinct/ become even more rare as they become more accepted?

No. As other, non-straight respondents have explained.

What is at some risk of going extinct is queerness as sexual dissidence. Hard to be a dissident when noone cares about your sexuality.

It at least proves that Quora moderation is human enough to be inconsistent.

One Quora employee liked your answer enough to put it in the digest.

One Quora user reported the answer for not answering the question.

One Quora moderator agreed with the reporter, and did not care about whether it had been sent out to the digest and was highly popular. That Quora moderator is not the same person as the Quora employee who liked it for the digest. And that Quora moderator is not applying the same criteria as the Quora employee. Nor do they care about whether the answer is popular.

And reluctantly, I agree that is an appropriate action: the moderator is supposed to be objective. (Unfortunately, more popular answers are more viewed, so they are in fact more likely to be reported.)

Whether the moderator actually has a clue or discretion is a completely different question. Quora’s approach on that is in fact that moderators must apply rules robotically, without discretion, so that Quora can’t be accused of favouritism.

(And so that the job can be outsourced to robots or robotic humans.)

So in answer to your question,

Can an answer be reported because people don’t like it even though it is one correct answer out of many.

… well, yes. An answer can be reported for any reason you want; we all have access to the Report button.

You know, I don’t exactly know why my uncle George migrated from a village in Cyprus to Sale, Victoria in 1947, to work as a carpenter in the post-war boom. I can pretty much guess though: family with seven kids, of which he was the eldest; in economic hardship; limited opportunities for work; and the streets in Australia were supposed to be paved with gold.

It was likely the same for my uncle Chris, who joined George in Tasmania. Chris had book learning as an engineer, but he settled into retail like his brother.

It wasn’t the same for my father. My father had a series of jobs in Cyprus: nurse, telegraphist, greengrocer. I don’t think he needed to leave. But with two siblings already overseas, he decided it was meet that the whole family join them. He moved out of family loyalty. He even paid for the whole family to get their medical testing done in Beirut.

It didn’t pan out that way.

• Andrew followed my father, stayed, and did retail too; he eventually moved to Melbourne. When we came back from Greece, dad decided we’d stay in Melbourne too after all.
• Dora followed my father, couldn’t find anyone to marry, and went back. (My father delayed marrying out of the traditional obligation to see that his unmarried sister was settled.)
• Helen was already married, and she wasn’t going anywhere.
• Chris left Tasmania, and returned with his family to his wife’s home town in Greece.
• My grandparents decided to stay in Cyprus at the last minute, and they kept their youngest, Savvas, with them.

So much for my father.

My aunt Steffie, Chris’ wife, was from a village in Eastern Crete. My father waited to marry off Dora, and gave up waiting when he was 35. (Dora, God rest her, married a year later. But that’s another story.) Just as Dora couldn’t find a suitable Greek to marry in Tasmania, my dad didn’t either.

So he put out word to Chris, now back in Crete with Steffie, whether he might know of any eligible partners.

My mother was from the same village as Steffie. Her family was not quite as poor as my father’s, but as a daughter she still got the short end of the stick. She did not want to be stuck in the village, and she rejected all local suitors. She was, therefore, an old maid by 1970 Cretan rural standards (at 25).

Steffie approached her. She said, why not. Her father chaperoned her to Tasmania, to make sure my dad was a suitable match. And she went straight to work in the fish and chips shop.

A year later, I was born.

It is mildly annoying to me, and I note that back in the day when Quora was skinnable on Chrome, there were skins to get rid of it. It is redundant particularly on phone, since refresh by dragging tends to be more effective anyway.

At least it mostly works. Pressing More Notifications rarely works for me on my Android.