Thx4A2A, Sofia. No idea why you asked, which makes it all the more flattering.

I have a high tolerance of repetition in music in general.

OTOH, I am old, I am old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled; so I know very little of music after 1995. You are young, Sofia; one day you will understand.

(You know that horrifying moment when you realise you’ve turned into your dad? Yeah. «Έχεις πολλάάάάά να μάθεις ακόμα»: “Son, you’ve got a lot to learn…”)

But of recent songs, I think Uptown Funk counts as something I could listen to on loop for hours. Mostly, of course, because it sounds like the music I grew up with.

Make a dragon wanna retire, man.

In fact, I think I’ll put it on loop now…

What I’ve used is “OP here” or “I’m the OP”. I want to use a succinct rather than a discursive form.

McKayla Kennedy says you don’t need to signal that you’ve answered your own question, because the question is community property.

But I do signal, at least some times, that I’ve answered my question, because it pertains to the answer (which is mine) not the question. It flags to readers that my answer is a self-answer, because:

• at least for some people it can make them wary of the answer (it contains unexpressed presuppositions, it’s self-promotion)
• I’m flagging that the answer is intended as a conversation-starter—I actually am pushing along a request for people to disagree with me.

That’s just me, of course.

Ah, Dimitris. Yoruba oga “boss” vs Ottoman Turkish ağa [aɣa, now aː] Agha (Ottoman Empire) “an honorific title for a civilian or military officer” < Old Turkic aqa “elder brother”.

Three letter word, final vowel the same, consonant similar, meanings in the same ballpark.

You can see why I’m not impressed. Islam was shared between Turkey and Nigeria, sure, but this was a specifically Ottoman title, and the cultural traffic just wasn’t there.

Besides, when a woman wants to flatter her mate in Greece, and call him “boss” and bring him his slippers and fulfil his patriarchal fantasies, she doesn’t call him “my agha”.

She calls him “my Pasha”. Pashas outranked aghas, after all.

What’s that I hear? Pshaw?

Why yes. Bashaw was an early English rendering of Pasha.

---

And, as a desultory attempt to answer the question as stated:

Here in Australia, I get hubbo from my wife. Partaking in the age-old tension between the two Australian hypocoristics, –o and –ie. Hubby is far more widespread throughout English.

Qo’noS, the Klingon home planet, uses loDnal. We know loD is ‘man’.

In Esperantujo, it’s edzo. A back formation from edzino “wife”, itself a reanalysis of the Litvak Yiddish pronounciation of the the suffix in Prinz-essin.

In Lojbanistan, it’s speni “spouse”. You can specify the gender as nakspe “male spouse”; I doubt most Lojbanists bother.

Originally Answered:

How can you describe the personality of the Greeks?

Noone’s biting?

InB4 “You can’t stereotype all Greeks”, &c &c

Mercurial. Impulsive.

There’s an apocryphal Turkish saying (which in fact, I’ve only found in Greek sources—but then again, I haven’t asked Quora): Gâvurun/Yunanın akili sonradan geliyor. Του Ρωμιού η γνώση ύστερα έρχεται. A Greek’s common sense comes later.

Passionate. Like to yell at each other as a performance piece. Like to disagree for the fun of it. The saying goes “Where there are two Greeks, there are three opinions”. (It’s a saying that Jews also lay claim to.)

Their sense of honour (amour propre: How do I translate the Greek word filotimo?) is a double-edged sword: it makes them generous to a fault, but also very touchy.

Very much about the collective and the social ritual, like many recently traditional societies. Operate through positive politeness (What are the negative and positive politeness strategies?) No interest in “personal space”.

Nationalistic, but mistrustful of authority and of notions of the common good. Enterprising and street-smart (or at least, they used to be). Blame malicious outside forces by default, rather than admit problems closer to home.

*shrug* That’s a start.

Christos (Christ) is the Greek translation of the Hebrew mashiach (Messiah), and both mean “the anointed one”. Initially it referred to anyone or anything consecrated with holy oil; for example, King David, unleavened bread, or King Cyrus.

For what a 1st century Jew would have understood as “the messiah”, see Messiah and Messiah in Judaism:

In Jewish eschatology, the term came to refer to a future Jewish king from the Davidic line, who will be “anointed” with holy anointing oil, to be king of God’s kingdom, and rule the Jewish people during the Messianic Age. In Judaism, the Messiah is not considered to be God or a pre-existent divine Son of God. He is considered to be a great political leader that has descended from King David. That is why he is referred to as Messiah ben David, which means “Messiah, son of David”. The messiah, in Judaism, is considered to be a great, charismatic leader that is well oriented with the laws that are followed in Judaism. He will be the one who will not “judge by what his eyes see” or “decide by what his ears hear”.

Thx4A2A, Linda.

I’ll go with the painting too. Even if I’m not a visual arts kind of guy.

I won’t do a long justification of that; others have, pro and con, mostly jocular.

Some have been less jocular. But you know what? Doodles do matter.

And even though Tom Groves meant it jocularly, well, when he says:

People die all the time, You can’t save ’em all. The real world is not like Pokemon.

… he’s not wrong.

It’s from a very different context, but see Yannis Makriyannis quote from Nick Nicholas’ answer to Did Greeks in the Ottoman age feel Greek or Roman? Why was Greek identity chosen and not Roman when fighting for independence?

I had two fine statues, a woman and a prince, intact—you could see the veins on them, that’s how perfect they were. Some soldiers had taken them and they were going to sell them to some Europeans, for a thousand thalers. I went over, I took the soldiers aside, and spoke to them. “These statues, even if they give you ten thousand thalers, don’t you stoop to letting them be taken out of our country. These are what we fought for.”

EDIT: Oh, and to encapsulate some other points made by Tom and Linda?

How many people now mourn Morosini blowing up the Parthenon?

How many people now mourn the soldiers Morosini blew up along with the Parthenon?

People pretty universally say the 7th is crap. I think the reason is only the last movement.

The first four movements are great. They are quite not as great as the 5th or 6th, which seems to say what they say better. In fact, each of the first three movements seems to be quite close to the corresponding movement in the 6th symphony, and to be outdone by it. But the middle movements are still all wonderful, and the 4th movement has a delightful urbane wistfulness about it, much more human-scaled than the Adagietto of the 5th. (It is after all meant to be scene-painting a night stroll around Vienna.)

It falls down in the last movement. Exegetes say that it’s deliberately meant to be bathetic, that Mahler is poking fun at the carefree style of the Strausses, just as Shakespeare made the problem comedies problematic, and Mahler himself made the finale of the 5th a study in anticlimax.

I buy it for the 5th. I don’t buy it for the 7th. It does sound to me like someone who’s trying to have a happy ending and failing; it does not sound to me like someone who’s doing that on purpose, to make a larger point.

Originally Answered:

How do I get Quora to stop telling me when people upvote something I already upvoted?

Originally Answered: How do I get Quora to stop telling me when people upvote something I already upvoted?

There is a saying here in Melbourne.

If you don’t like the weather… wait five minutes.

Any implications about the stability of Quora’s UI are deliberate.

I refer you to:

• I want to add a new language to Google Translate. How do I do that?
• What are Google Translate requirements and criteria to add new language into the list of translated languages?
• How do I add malayalam language to Google translate for translating from english to malayalam?

It’s a straight-out prioritisation game, and there are lots of reasons why Karen would be down the list.

• Not a majority language of a country or state (so you can’t do the lobbying that e.g. Mongolian did)
• Not a majority language of a country or state (so it’s simply not as pressing: Karen speakers with access to computers are likely already going to know Burmese)
• Not a majority language of a country or state (so it is unlikely to have generated an extensive corpus of bilingual text—without which, nothing is possible for Google Translate)

Now, Google can make exceptions, as languages take its fancy; Haitian Creole was one, for example, and an answer indicates that Google made a point of building the necessary bilingual resources. But (a) that’s for Google to build, not you, and (b) Google is going to prioritise by need, and there are a lot of unsupported languages with ten times the speakers: 8 Surprising Languages Not on Google Translate – K International

It’s an unsympathetic answer I know. I think the best you can do is contribute to the online presence of Karen, including getting involved with Drum Publications—so that there is more of a Karen corpus text. And building bilingual corpora is critical: translate things from English, and put them online. Without these, there’s no real point asking Google Translate for anything.

Online Unicode support for even Burmese was extremely late, so there is surely ground to be made up for Burmese-script Karen online.

Which makes a better ambassador, a political appointee or career diplomat? has an answer from the late John Burgess—but not, I must say, a very informative answer.

The answer, I would have to assume, is no. The ambassador may well be a political appointee, and therefore likely a figurehead. Maybe less so for Australian political appointees, who tend to be ex-politicians, than for the US, who tend to be donors. Politics is at least somewhat relevant experience.

That does not imply that the rest of the staff in the embassy are decorative, and that all decisions are taken centrally in the State Department/Foreign Ministry.