Month: October 2016

The questions I find on my own, I answer quickly and enthusiastically.

I’ve become enough of a MVW that I get a fair few A2As, something like 10 a day. The quality is variable, and I don’t pass on A2As as aggressively as I should, so I’ve got a sizeable backlog, with some A2As just staring back at me annoyingly for weeks.

So A2As that I don’t answer immediately feel a lot more like a chore; and enough of a backlog becomes really demotivating. I try to keep the backlog down to 10–15.

That said, A2As are more on topic for your core topics of interest than questions you find randomly; so answering some of this, in fact, good for your stats. (There are also some askers who keep asking me questions I’ve already told them I don’t have competence in. Those I now quickly pass on.)

There are some A2As that I answer “only ’cause it’s you”. They can in fact end up being fun, because I have a bit more of an excuse to make them humorous.

Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges : §1876 on

οὗτος μὲν γὰρ ὕδωρ, ἐγὼ δ᾽ οἶνον πίνω for this man drinks water, whereas I drink wine. (habitual)

ἄγει δὲ πρὸς φῶς τὴν ἀλήθειαν χρόνος “time brings the truth to light” (gnomic)

“προδίδοτον τὴν Ἑλλάδα” they are trying to betray Greece (conative = attempt: “The idea of attempt or intention is an inference from the context and lies in the present only so far as the present does not denote completion”)

ἀπόλλυμαι “I am on the verge of ruin” (anticipation)

“εἰ αὕτη ἡ πόλις ληφθήσεται, ἔχεται καὶ ἡ πᾶσα Σικελία” if this city is taken, the whole of Sicily as well is in their power (anticipation)

χρόνῳ ἀγρεῖ Πριάμου πόλιν ἅδε κέλευθος in time this expedition will capture Priam’s city (prophecy)

I won’t count the historical/annalistic present, that isn’t modal.

Pegah Esmaili’s answer to Do ex-Muslims face discrimination at their homes?

No not at all, only my grandmother has a few times looked at me as if “what the fu*k are you trying to be my beloved damn grandchild? weren’t you praying till…like 2-3 years ago?”

https://www.quora.com/Do-ex-Musl…

It looked a little bit like this, didn’t it?

I did leave out Pegah’s altar to a potato chip. Luckily.

Other answers have addressed why there are anti-Islamic parties in Australia.

Why are there several anti-Islamic parties in Australia?

Splinterism, an endemic issue with extremist parties, and movements in general preoccupied with ideological purity rather than electoral success through coalition politics. Communism is even more notorious for splinterism, after all.

Latest instance I can think of: the United Patriots Front has splintered from Reclaim Australia, because Reclaim Australia wasn’t monomaniacally anti-Islamic enough.

But if we go through AIJAC’s list, we see another reason: anti-Islamism is not a defining characteristic of many of the parties listed there; it’s just a common attribute of populist right/far right groupings.

• Pauline Hanson’s One Nation: anti-immigrant, rightwing populist. (East Asians were her bugbear twenty years ago.)
• Australia First Party: neo-nazi.
• Rise Up Australia Party: Christianist. I can’t imagine a Sri Lankan heading up the United Patriots Front, after all.
• Citizens Electoral Council: LaRouche-ist. How the hell I ended up on their mailing list is a mystery to me.

I did Engineering as an undergrad. So I should have a good appreciation of statistics, and work through the odds, right?

Screw that. I played a slot machine once when I was 16, lost all the money I put in after being ahead, and I’m not doing that shit again. I refuse to set foot on my own into the Melbourne Casino (although sometimes I have no choice, such as my cousin’s wedding reception, or my wife buying tickets to see *sigh* Richard Marx).

Besides, Melbourne Uni’s teaching of Engineering is crap, and the way they teach maths to engineers is even worse. You can taste the contempt from the lecturers. Anything I learned in probability and statistics went in one ear and out the other.

So I’ll take the 1K. Every. Fricking. Time.

Which, of course, is why I am not loaded.

Thank you very much, OP, for providing the link.

This is in fact the same letter as that other one you provided, Can modern day Greeks understand and read ancient scriptures in ancient ruins (Like this one?)

Since you’ve provided a clean transcription I don’t have to squint at, happy to do it:

King Antiochus to Menedemus, Greetings.

We want to increase the honours of our sister Queen Laodice even more, and we consider this most necessary, not only so we can live with her caringly and like a guardian, but also because we want to act piously towards sacred things. And we are taking care to do what we should do and what it is right to do, to meet her needs, with family-like love. And we have decided, just as head priests commemorating us have been set up during our reign, that head priestesses commemorating her should be set up in the same places, who will wear golden crowns bearing her image; and they will be enrolled in the covenants, along with the head priests of our ancestors and our current head priests. So since Laodice was brought up in the places under your rule, let everything written above be carried out, and let copies of the letters be written on columns and set up in the most conspicuous places, so that now and forever our favour to our sister should be made clear through these.

119th year of the Seleucids, month of Xanthicus.

Another cultural Orthodox here. I too was allowed beer with lemonade or watered down wine as a kid. I was also told I couldn’t be a sinner as a kid, because I didn’t have the capacity of mature judgement yet. (The legal system acts in a similar way.)

I presume your parents are just using sin to discourage you without having to explain themselves. Greeks in their position might say krima “shame”, maybe even krima apo to Theo “shame according to God”. But I’d be surprised if they used the term amartia “sin”.

Top 10:

• Pim Fortuyn. That gay guy who hated Muslims and got killed.
• William Of Orange. That guy the Dutch National Anthem is about.
• Antoine van Leeuwenhoek. That microscope dude.
• Desiderius Erasmus. That guy who was the premier scholar of his age.
• Anne Frank. With the diary.
• Rembrandt Van Rijn. The paintings guy.
• Vincent van Gogh. The other paintings guy.

7/10.

Top 50:

• Christiaan Huygens. Optics dude.
• Freddy Heineken. Beer dude, got kidnapped.
• Baruch de Spinoza. Nature Is God philosopher dude.
• M.C. Escher. Every geek’s favourite graphic artist.
• Queen Beatrix. Or whoever the second last queen was.
• Hendrik Lorentz. The guy whose equations Einstein used.
• Abel Tasman. The guy who discovered Tasmania.

14/20

Top 200:

• Johannes Vermeer. The other other paintings guy.
• Thomas à Kempis. The mediaeval theologian guy.
• Willem III of Orange. The Glorious Revolution guy. Mr Queen Anne.
• Piet Mondriaan. The painter guy with all the squares.
• Paul Verhoeven. Showgirls. Enough said. (19/100)
• John de Mol. Isn’t he the guy who invented Reality TV? *Checks* Yeah. Screw that guy.
• Bernard Haitink. Conductor guy.
• Koning Lodewijk Napoleon. Oh, that’s cute. Calling him by a Dutch name doesn’t make him any less a rent-a-king Napoleon dropped off out of his family progeny.
• Pieter Brueghel. That painter dude with the bleak landscapes, that Pat Nixon namechecks in Nixon in China.
• Louis Andriessen. Hey, I remember him, he’s the dissonant minimalism guy with a bug up his ass about the Canon. I liked De Staat, actually.

24/200, but I’m sure a couple of those are technicalities.

I tied with Peter Flom, which surprises me.

Missing from the list:

• Edsger W. Dijkstra. Goto shall forever more be considered harmful.
• Dirk Christiaan Hesseling. Pioneer of Greek linguistics and creole linguistics.
• Yolanda Hadid. For being less nuts than the other women on Real Housewives of Beverley Hills. Not a high bar, I acknowledge.

That was awesome fun, Jordan. Let’s do it again some time!

You wanna know how it feels like to write 1000 answers?

Well this is how it feels like!

It feels like I should be grateful to Brian Bi for t3nsor/quora-backup. Which has made THIS possible:

In glorious Baskerville.

Yeah, Baskerville! Fond memories of my childhood World Book Encyclopaedia.

The plain Greek is a bit lumpy, but the italics make up for it. Almost.

---

Seriously? I do feel a sense of achievement. Some of those answers have been throwaway, but most of those answers, I’m proud of, throwaway or not. They’ve been me. And they’ve captured some good journeys.

Following Uri Granta’s lead, a few stats about the journey, although I’ve focused on different things.

The distribution of topics on the profile page is a sledgehammer, and I prefer to have a priority list of narrower topics. The topics list also doesn’t capture topics you don’t know about, but write about anyway.

Here’s my topic list as *I* actually like to think of it. Catch-all topics in boldface.

Greek Alphabet: 8
Modern Greek: 10
Greek Language: 201

English Language: 94
Latin: 9
Esperanto: 9
Lojban: 6
Klingon: 6
Specific languages: 27
Historical Linguistics: 13
Semantics: 7
Pragmatics: 4
Profanity: 4
Dialects: 13
Linguistics: 87

Etymology: 16
Diacritics: 3
Capitalisation: 3
Surnames: 7
Names and Naming: 5
Writing Systems: 3
Alphabets: 5
Language: 31
Grammar: 9
Words: 4

Crete: 7
Ancient Greece: 20
Roman Empire: 9
Ottoman Empire: 6
Greek History: 3
Culture of Greece: 7
Classics: 4
Greek Ethnicity and People: 12
Greek Mythology: 6
Cyprus: 2
Greece: 23

Politics of Australia: 6
People of Australia: 6
Australia: 15

Classical Music: 17
Music: 11

Orthodox Christianity: 3
Richard M. Nixon: 6

Quora Usage Data: 10
Quora Community: 12
Quora: 78

Survey Question: 26

Other: 129

… That’s a lot of Other; and I really couldn’t get it any more granular.

At least the blues in the pie chart confirm it: I’m still a linguist.

The graph of the addiction seems to point to January and June:

And how loquacious have I been?

Minimum 1, maximum 1715, average 191, median 147, mode 81.

Brian van der Spuy is quite right that the extensive orchestral palette is in line with Mahler’s desire to encompass the world in his symphonies.

Howard Levitsky’s answer, featuring Gershwin’s car horns, is ironic, given the contemporary reaction to the cowbells in Mahler’s 6th:

Gustav Mahler Pictures

The cartoon’s caption reads: “Herr Gott! Daß ich die Huppe vergessen habe! Jetzt kann ich noch eine Sinfonie schreiben.” (My God, I’ve forgotten the motor-horn! Now I shall have to write another symphony).

The cartoon was published in the Austrian/German magazine, Die Muskete (The Musket), on 10 January 1907. The cartoonist was Fritz Schönpflug (1873-1951).

Was it helpful? Yes, because Mahler (who after all had a day job as an opera conductor) had a keen sense of orchestral colour, and timbre is a major component of his musical meaning. If offstage bands and mistuned violins were part of the palette he used to communicate, then cowbells and harmoniums were too. And Mahler always used his colours with great delicacy, it wasn’t a wall of sound.

Was it effective? Personal opinion follows:

• The whip in the scherzo of the 5th: yes, it contributes to the manicness of that particular passage.
• The hammer in the 6th: most of the time the realisation of the hammer blow is underwhelming. Even when it isn’t, the “thud” is an extramusical, programmatic element; musically, I’d add a couple of bass drums would have done the same job. But watching a performance, and seeing the performer slowly walk up to the hammerbox, is powerful. (Opera conductor, remember.)
• The cowbells of the 5th and 6th: I know what Mahler was communicating, and why he was communicating it at those points. My opinion, he didn’t need it, it’s a little too real-world to be integrated into the fabric of what is going on—music on its own conveys pastoral solace just fine. I find it a little distracting. Mercifully in all the performances I’ve heard, it’s pretty damn quiet.
• The mandolin in the 7th: yes. There’s a lot of atmosphere-painting where it is used, and it fits.
• The celeste and the harmonium in the 8th. Sorry, I find the picture Mahler paints at that point, of the Mater Gloriosa, silly. But you know, that means that the celeste and the harmonium are all too effective: that was the picture Mahler meant to paint, and it’s what Goethe chose to write. The 2nd movement of the 8th is after all an oratorio, with a lot of tone painting going on. We just can’t buy into the Eternal feminine now.