Overlapping topic recognition

Since Yash Geryani posted about Pink, Pink, and Pink, and since this gets read by Quora topic masters, who have some say over the Topic Bot:

Is the abolition of Games by Christian Emperors proof that the naked body was not associated any more with divine beauty?

I don’t know the answer, OP.

But the attitude of Christianity towards eroticism is indeed on the ascetic side, and has been since St Paul, and arguably Jesus himself (if you look on someone with lust, poke your eye out). The attitude towards the naked body would follow suit; and of course the Games were explicitly a pagan religious ceremony anyway, which was reason enough to ban them.

Jews are happy to point out that Judaism’s attitude towards sex is much healthier than Christianity’s: where Paul barely tolerates matrimony, the Talmud enjoins a healthy sex life as a conjugal obligation.

It’s not as simple as that; but the Song of Songs is neither here nor there. Yes, when it was composed the Song of Songs was erotic; Wikipedia points out parallels with Mesopotamian and Egyptian love poetry, and the suspicion of an allusion to Tammuz and Ishtar. But Judaism, let alone Christianity in the 4th century AD was not the proto-Judaism of the 10th or 6th century BC, when it was composed. The Song of Songs was only accepted into the Jewish Bible in the second century AD (!), and that only on the condition that it was an allegory for God’s love for Israel:

For instance, the famed first and second century Rabbi Akiva forbade the use of the Song of Songs in popular celebrations. He reportedly said, “He who sings the Song of Songs in wine taverns, treating it as if it were a vulgar song, forfeits his share in the world to come”.

The Talmud’s treatment of Epikoros is a rejection of Hellenistic hedonism, for which Epicurus is the poster boy (fairly or not). For all the disjonts between Judaism and Christianity, I’d have thought Jews and Christians would be united in looking askance at nudity in the Games.

In Koine Greek, how are verbs conjugated based on their tense (if there is any pattern at all)?

Not quite clear what your question is. Assuming I’ve understood it:

Koine Greek, like other languages, has a notion of principal parts. There are six tenses you need to know for a verb; once you know them, you can derive the remainder. The six tenses are all indicatives: present; future; aorist active; perfect active; aorist passive; perfect passive.

There are in fact regular classes of verb, derived from the verb root; but there’s a lot of morphophonology happening at the interface of the root and the tense suffix, so you need to be familiar with what the possible tense stems are.

To grapple with the possibilities, read this: How can I learn to individuate ancient Greek verbs? It’s written for Attic, but Koine is not substantially simpler than Attic.

Have you ever seen Quora.vn?

Well, I have now.

It’s a reasonable surmise that Quora.com had nothing to do with Quora.vn, since they’ve only just launched es.quora.com after years of “no foreign language Quoras”.

Quora Việt Nam – Timeline has a post starting:

Trang chủ Website Hỏi Đáp Của Người Việt

Chắc hẳn bạn đã từng nghe về website hỏi đáp nổi tiếng thế giới http://Quora.com. không ai có thể phủ nhận được mức độ hiểu quả và tính khả thi khi áp dụng mà nó đem lại. nhưng giờ đây chúng tôi đã cố gắng để mang đến cho người dùng việt nam website hỏi đáp ấy bằng tất cả lòng tận tâm và mong muốn được giúp những thắc mắc của các bạn có câu trả lời 1 cách nhanh nhất và đa chiều nhất

Google Translated as:

The Website FAQ’s Quora.vn Vietnam

Surely you’ve heard about the popular question and answer website http://Quora.com world. no one can deny the extent feasible and effective when applied it brings. but now we have tried to bring to Vietnam website users that inquiry with all devotion and desire to assist your questions have an answer one way fastest and most multi-dimensional

Hm.

Language-specific Q&A sites are a wonderful and cool thing.

Using an existing brand for your own Q&A site, with no apparent coordination with the brand owner… not so much.

I don’t want Quora Inc, the Evil Silicon Valley Behemoth Who Won’t Even Open Up An API, to go mediaeval on Quora.vn’s ass; but… this is not really cool.

Can the wonderful people of Quora upload a picture or two of themselves?

I am a wonderful person of Quora.

I see three or four people I know on this thread. The network graph must expand!

Me 10 years ago, with my sister:

Me as Dr Nick, 7 years ago (at my future best man’s graduation):

With my then girlfriend, 4 years ago:

Close to two years ago: me, my mother, my wife, my father:

Me and the dog. Last month. I’m the one on the left:

The 1000 answer club

How does it feel like to write 1000 answers?

Don’t know yet. But I note the following with interest.

As of this writing, of those I follow:

The Greeks have a sage saying. Οὐκ ἐν τῷ πολλῷ τὸ εὖ. The Good is not to be found in the Many.

To which I say, screw that. Michael, Dimitra, Kelley: you’re on notice. Race ya!

Who is the other Hades and which are their family ties?

In this episode of Quora Jeopardy!, I find that the source OP is drawing on (Dimitris Sotiropoulos’ answer to Who is the other Hades and which are their family ties?, see comments) does not necessarily lead to the conclusion he is positing.


The answer is drawn from the first successful Google hit I got on OP’s source material: Mantziou, Mary. 1990. Euripides fr. 912 [math]N^2[/math] (inc. fab.) Dodone (Philologia) 19: 209–224. http://olympias.lib.uoi.gr/jspui…

The source text is an Orphic Hymn attributed to Euripides, and cited in two sources: Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata V 70,2, and Satyrus the Peripatetic’s Life of Euripides, fr. 37 col iii.

Let me cite Clement’s version from the Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Stromata (Clement of Alexandria)

In the most wonderful harmony with these words, Euripides, the philosopher of the drama, is found in the following words—making allusion, I know not how, at once to the Father and the Son:—

To you, the Lord of all, I bring
Cakes and libations too,
O Zeus,
Or Hades
would you choose be called;
[Ζεὺς εἴθ’ ᾍδης ὀνομαζόμενος στέργεις]
Do accept my offering of all fruits,
Rare, full, poured forth.

For a whole burnt-offering and rare sacrifice for us is Christ. And that unwittingly he mentions the Saviour, he will make plain, as he adds:—

For you who, ‘midst the heavenly gods,
Jove’s sceptre sway’st, dost also share
The rule of those underground with Hades.
[χθονίων θ’ ᾍδῃ μετέχεις ἀρχῆς]

Then he says expressly:—

Send light to human souls that fain would know
Whence conflicts spring, and what the root of ills,
And of the blessed gods to whom due rites
Of sacrifice we needs must pay, that so
We may from troubles find repose.

[I’ve corrected the translation “underground with Hades”]

The poem is addressed to a god who can choose to be called either Zeus or Hades, and who both holds Zeus’ sceptre, and rules over the chthonic souls.

Clement’s conclusion is that the Orphic hymns anticipate Christian theology, with God the Father as Zeus, God the Son as Hades, and the two being conflated as the one Substance. Satyrus thought this reflected Anaxagoras’ cosmology instead. Other historians of religion have thought the Zeus/Hades blend is Plutus, or Zagreus, or Dionysus or some other Other God, whether Orphic or Chthonic. Mantziou herself (too clever by half) thinks that since this is a necromancy, the Other God is the other god involved in necromancies, Hermes.

What is your hometown’s dark secret?

I have several hometowns, but the hometown I’ll pick is Sitia, Lasithi prefecture, Crete. Small, no account place, placid, few tourists.

I’ve made several discoveries about my hometown that came as a surprise to me. They had not exactly been publicised, and they’re embarrassing, so I guess they’re dark secrets. They get progressively darker.

1. Sitia is watched over by the Kazarma fortress, which the Venetians left behind. So you’d assume that Sitia remained a going concern for centuries.

In fact, when you spend more time in Sitia (and more importantly, when you then visit the other three, much bigger main towns of Crete, Iraklio, Hania and Rethymno), you notice that there’s one Venetian building, and no Ottoman buildings. There’s a reason for that: when the Venetians lost the town, there was no Sitia left. The town was abandoned in 1651 (destroyed by the Venetians themselves, Greek Wikipedia tells me), and rebuilt two centuries later, in 1870. By Muslims. Who called it Avinye.

2. There is a couplet that does the rounds of Crete, on the three main towns of Crete.

Οι Χανιώτες για τ’ άρματα,
οι Ρεθυμνιώτες για τα γράμματα,
οι Καστρινοί για το ποτήρι

People from Hania are for weapons, people from Rethymno for learning,
people from Kastro [Iraklio] are for drinking

Now, Sitia may well be a lot smaller than Rethymno, let alone Hania and Iraklio, but it is missing from the couplet. Which is also curiously missing its second rhyme.

No surprise that I never heard how the couplet ends while living in Sitia. As recorded by a 19th century folklorist (Γιατί τους Κρητικούς τους λένε Μανόληδες;), it ends with

οι Λασιώτες όλοι χοίροι or Στειακοί καθάριοι χοίροι

Those from Lasithi are all swine/
Those from Sitia are pure swine

And what do you know. It rhymes after all.

3. Remember how I said Sitia was reestablished by Muslims in 1870?

There’s not a lot of mentions in Sitia in the Australian press, searchable at the magnificent Newspapers Home – Trove site from the National Library of Australia (where any random can correct the OCR).

There is however this.

THE MASSACRES AT SITIA. – LONDON, 10th March. – The Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 – 1954) – 11 Mar 1897

LONDON, 10th March.

The European consuls at Heraklion have confirmed the report received recently that the Christian insurgents had massacred 400 Moslems at Sitia. Several children of Mahometan families were slashed and wounded by the Christians, and in one case the ears of a child were cut off.

No. Somehow, I never heard of that incident while living in Sitia.

(See Cretan State for the 1897 insurrection, which led to Crete being granted autonomy.)

Not counting click languages, what is the oddest sounding language to speakers of English?

The weirdest sounds cross-linguistically would have to be those with a different airstream mechanism to the normal, pulmonic egressive mechanism.

The normal pulmonic egressive mechanism is simply making the sounds while breathing out of your lungs.

The lingual ingressive mechanism involves making sounds while sucking in air around your tongue. Those are, of course, clicks.

The two other mechanisms are:

  • Glottalic ingressive: gulping down around your throat. Those are Implosive consonants. Found in Africa and Southeast Asia.
  • Glottalic egressive: popping air out from around your throat. Those are Ejective consonants. Found in the Caucasus, the Americas, and some parts of Africa.

Julia Gillard has become much hated (perhaps unfairly) in Australia. Has she discredited the idea of a female Prime Minister of Australia?

Tough question.

Gillard herself, in her farewell speech, displayed a salutary self-awareness when she said:

I do want to say the reaction to being the first female prime minister does not explain everything about my time in the prime ministership, nor does it explain nothing about my prime ministership.

There was sexist venom around Gillard’s prime ministership; the instances are known and uncontroversial.

But there was also a true disappointment in Gillard. In how her predecessor, a charismatic leader, was deposed without anyone explaining why. In how an engaged, activist education minister was transformed into a rigid, robotic prime minister. In how an atheist in a de facto relationship resisted marriage equality, rather than showing any leadership. In how her Misogyny Speech energised everyone in the world but politically engaged Australians, who knew the context was the whole sordid mess of the speakership of Peter Slipper.

Has it ruined the prime ministership for women? I don’t think so; it’s been two PMs since in the merry-go-round of Australian Federal politics, it’s already “Julia Who?” But then, I didn’t anticipate the outburst of sexism that hounded Gillard to begin with.

Could Julie Bishop do it? Probably not, loyal deputy too often, although she is one of the few members of the Abbott cabinet that commanded any respect at large. Could Penny Wong or Tanya Plibersek? Maybe. We were in a strange regressive place under Abbott, but a lot of people do want to move on. Which is why Turnbull was greeted as a saviour by everyone but the conservative true believers. (Remember that?)