Month: November 2016

OP, but the question comes from Jason Blau, at https://www.quora.com/Why-Arabic…

Fascinating question!

Reposting his full question:

If the Confederacy had become independent, would their english eventually be considered a different language? (Very similar of course, like the relationship between Dutch and Afrikaans). One could assume the prestige dialect would be as distinct as possible from “Yankee” speech, there would be much less media/cultural influence over southern english to ensure that it was relatively intelligible to Northerners, the little to no immigration to the Confederacy would ensure the North would drift further away, and most importantly, the Confederacy would have had an army and a navy.

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My answer:

If this was 1000 years ago, sure, they would have drifted apart. But 150 years apart in modern times? With the universality of print (including print from the UK)? I think you’d get a situation more like Australian English vs British English. The prestige accent certainly wouldn’t be Midwestern in the CSA, accents would diverge a bit more, and you might see idioms like fixin’ to in standard CSA English which you won’t in standard US English.

But I believe the forces that have kept US English and UK English mutually intelligible would still in play for US and CSA English, even if they hated each other.

EDIT to respond to Jason Blau’s question in comments.

Spoken English dialects? With less Damn Yankees around, with a less industrialised economy so less mobility in general, and with less of a centralised identity pushed in schooling (it is the con-federacy after all)… there’d be more drift, yeah. Not sure if that would extend to the Bayou though: it’s still a “foreign” language, and I can’t imagine that there’d be no Speak American sentiment in the CSA (or rather, Speak Southron).

Warning: maudlin self-indulgence ahead.

It’s changed. It changes for everyone who gets to a critical mass of Quora engagement. I fear change, so I like to see the worst in it.

I’ve accumulated more and more readers and views over the past year, like many a prominent writer here. I don’t know what the threshold is for becoming a prominent writer—it’s a topic of some debate; but if you’re not doing cartwheels with every new follower, and you’re not scanning the list of everyone who’s ever upvoted you, you’re probably up there.

It’s wonderful to be read by lots of people, and be a go-to person for a bunch of A2As, some of which are even relevant to you. It’s wonderful to meet lots of people with lots of distinctive voices, and learn from them.

But there’s been a change.

The people I follow and engage with on Quora fall into two classes. That is to say, I make them fall into two classes, because binary classification of the universe is a useful device, even if it’s not wholly accurate.

I love and respect both classes, and I really don’t want any of the people I appreciate to take this badly. But there’s a difference.

When I joined, I zeroed in to my core subject matter of expertise. I exhausted all the pending questions in Greek (language). I’ve made a good effort to monopolise that topic: although I might not answer every single question in the topic, it comes close. And I then branched off into related topics: Greece, Linguistics, Classics—they’re all on my profile page.

Along the way, I engaged with people who cared about my core subject matter, or those related topics. I started learning as well as lecturing. I started socialising as well as learning. I started befriending as well as socialising.

Those are my Old Growth Quora friends, people I’ve met via things I know about. In the list of friends I’ve put up at Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile, they’re 12/15 in the first batch (and the other 3 were people I admired from very afar). In the second batch, they’re only 11 out of 30.

The Old Growth Quora friends are not a homogenous group, not at all. They’re not all linguists, they’re not all Greek, they’re not all PhDs. But they do have a spectrum of common interests. They’re a closely networked group. They all show up in each others’ comments, they are strongly supportive of each other, and I think their personalities are fairly similar. I feel at home with them; and it’s a feeling I’ve missed for a decade.

There’s been something of a shift for me; I’ve bemoaned it by accentuating the negative of it (as I always would) at It feels hollower. As part of that shift, I’ve broadened my Quora associations, from people who already know what I’m talking about, to people who don’t necessarily care; from people I know stuff with, to people who know stuff I don’t; from people I have a lot in common with, to people I want to get to have more in common with.

They are amazing people, each and every fricking one of them. I don’t follow people just for jollies. Expanding who I follow has been very good for me: I have learned a lot from them, and I’m grateful to them for it.

They also are more prominent Quorans, on aggregate, than me. When I got here, I refused to follow anyone with more than 1k followers—and the Old Growth group broadly fall into that group. The New Growth group are mostly 1k–10k. I’ve said to a friend (who’s actually the one Old Growth/New Growth marginal case) that it feels like I’ve joined the Cool Kids’ table.

But I feel more adrift: I’m much more out of my comfort zone. The New Growth friends are not a close knit group, they don’t have much in particular in common, and I’m starting to find some of them don’t like each other. I probably won’t feel as close to the New Growth friends as I feel to the Old Growth friends. I’m questioning more what I’m doing here. And that’s not to even mention the disillusionment with Quora Inc that I’ve bemoaned often enough elsewhere.

Still. Growth is good.

I suspect this kind of shift is common; interested to hear from others if it is.

I’m going to limit this to lexicon, and not get into other areas of language change.

Think about it. You just spoke of scientific terms being planned out meticulously and promoted by universally acknowledged authorities. Scientific terms are part of language. That includes smaller languages’ authorities, which come up with canonical translations of other languages’ scientific terms.

Why doesn’t that happen in general with vocabulary? It’s not like there’s a shortage of authorities wanting to run languages.

First, the only function of scientific language that scientists consciously acknowledge is referential, describing the world. (There’s other stuff they don’t acknowledge, such as group identity.)

But language in general does a lot of stuff, that a central authority is simply not going to be able to predict. And language is a spontaneously changeable instrument, which authorities simply can’t intervene in in practice. It’s the major vehicle of interpersonal relationships, and of individual expression.

Even if it did, language is transmitted person to person, and evolves through a network of influencers and followers—being a social phenomenon. Any central authority is going to be only one of the influencers. And not everyone is going to choose to follow everything a influencer does.

Which makes it ultimately a democratic-ish outcome.

Not to speak to your particular instance, but I have seen it for people whose answers have been collapsed or deleted.

I don’t know of one; in fact what I’ve seen is linguists call adjectives in Asian languages verbs, to deal with the commonalities. Stative verbs, if you make it more precise.

In fact, whether adjectives are real as a cross-linguistic category is a legit question.

Did anyone notice a slightly… male bias to I love youse guys #2?

Yes?

That’s because I was saving up the female Quorans I have come to admire and appreciate and learn from since I love youse guys for a second post.

So, to: Sierra Spaulding (wield the sword); Jordan Yates (holding Yorick the Skull); Gigi J Wolf (La Gigi!); McKayla Kennedy (McDoodles!); Clarissa Lohr (estimegata malsamideano); Tracey Bryan (Traaaace!); Pegah Esmaili (canım! PUT DOWN THE POTATO CHIP!); Laura Hale (more Numbers please); Kelley Spartiatis (the Virgin-Voiced Scouse); Irene Colthurst (Doctor of Americana); Audrey Ackerman (Jane Marr!); Josephine Stefani (Spirit Sister! Prost!); Sophia de Tricht (*please don’t hurt me*); Jae Alexis Lee (I hate it when she’s right, which is all the fricking time); Mary C. Gignilliat (Lady X[XX]),

I love reading you, I love seeing you, I love bantering with you, and I love learning from you.

I love youse chicks.

Er, babes.

Er, ladies.

Er, women. That’s it. I love youse women.

Linguā anglicā: “Key to renowned Quorans”

I have taken to cartooning Quorans I like and banter with. Both the cartoons and the banter feature jocular references that may not be immediately obvious to outsiders, who can only judge from the Quorans’ profile pic. (Often enough, the profile pic is all I have to go on to.)

Herewith, a key to my in-joke references, which gives me a good excuse to link-love Quorans some more. Depictions drawn from profile pics are not further explained.

I love youse guys #2

To Jeremy M. Thompson (too tall to fit the frame; and I can’t draw someone sitting cross-legged); Mohammed Khateeb Kamran (Hansolophontes); Michael J. McFadden (I miss passive smoking); Alberto Yagos (whose third job is correcting my Latin conjugation); Habib Fanny (Habib le toubib qui rit); Curtis Lindsay (who has dragged me kicking and screaming to Chopin); Gareth Jones (the metricist of the North West); Steven de Guzman (the first of many Lazaruses); Scott Welch (my True Quora Master); Miguel Paraz (my next door neighbour); Edward Conway (the most polite Quoran conceivable); Steve Theodore (the Classical prestidigitator); Uri Granta (the Zarphatic mathemagician); Vladimir Menkov (Slavicist of Champions); Adam Mathias Bittlingmayer (expert in Four Homelands):

Jeremy Markeith Thompson: several things going on. He’s 6 foot lots, so he’s tall (and his profile pic is not very detailed); he’s wearing sunglasses, because apparently that’s how he shields his Male Gaze; he meditates, hence the hand position (but not the cross legged); he’s wearing a tux, because he’s a conservative (though likely not Nation Of Islam), and a Class Act.

Mohammed Khateeb Kamran: Khateeb complained that I hadn’t come up with a nickname for him, and undertook to perform a Perseid deed worthy of a nickname. Well, if he’s going to undertake a deed worthy of Perseus, how about Medusa-Slayer? Medusophontes in Homeric Greek. And Khateeb gets to carry Medusa’s head around.

Except, when I told him how I admired Robert Frost for coming up with Adam DiCaprio (when complaining about the lack of spoiler blocking), Khateeb admitted that he may have accidentally triggered Robert’s indignation, by blurting out a recent Star Wars film spoiler as a question. Hence, Hansolophontes, and updated head.

… It was only a day after posting this sketch that I realised: Oh shit. Decapitation. And Khateeb is Muslim.

But you know what? Fuck ISIS. I’m drawing Khateeb as Perseus, I know it, he knows it, and now you know it. The throwbacks of Raqqa may have blown up Palmyra, but they don’t get to own my country’s motherfucking mythology. And Khateeb is welcome to enjoy my country’s mythology too.

So. Having said that.

Michael J. McFadden: Smoking, of course.

Alberto Yagos: he teaches Latin in high school. Of course he’s wearing a toga. Don’t all Latin teachers?

Habib Fanny: Francophone. Habib le toubib qui rit: Habib, the laughing medico.

Gareth Jones: I first noticed him because he was posting about poetical metres. Proud Canadian, in that understated way Canadians are.

Steven de Guzman: First Quoran I know to have been banned, then unbanned: brought back from the dead, like Lazarus. (He has it on his bio; I think I came up with it.) That is meant to be Steven emerging from a coffin in a shroud, like icons depict Lazarus.

Scott Welch: Long term Quora critic, whom I have learned much from. Depicted throwing darts at Quora. NOT at Miguel Paraz wearing a Top Writer T-shirt.

Miguel Paraz: Works two blocks from my workplace.

Uri Granta: His bachelor name (i.e. pre-marriage) is Zarphaty. Zarphatic is the Hebrew word for French (originally the Biblical name of Sarepta in Lebanon). I don’t think Uri is French, but he is a mathemagician.

Adam Mathias Bittlingmayer: Knows an inordinate amount about the homelands of both himself (Germany, Serbia) and his wife (Armenia, Turkey).

Linguā anglicā: “Key to renowned Quorans”

I have taken to cartooning Quorans I like and banter with. Both the cartoons and the banter feature jocular references that may not be immediately obvious to outsiders, who can only judge from the Quorans’ profile pic. (Often enough, the profile pic is all I have to go on too.)

Herewith, a key to my in-joke references, which gives me a good excuse to link-love Quorans some more. Depictions drawn from profile pics are not further explained.

I love youse guys:

Jimmy Liu (gone but never forgotten), Michael Masiello (magister optimus), Robert Todd (elegentiae arbiter), Lyonel Perabo (skis grow out of his shoes), Zeibura S. Kathau (no goddamn amateur), Lara Novakov (#freelaranole), Aziz Dida (asker of neighbourly questions), Philip Newton (my Quora mentor), Joachim Pense (maintainer of standards), Sam Morningstar (knows more than a thing or two), Dan Holliday (the US Jimmy Liu), Brian Collins (get down here soon!), Dimitris Almyrantis (erudite gadfly), Dimitra Triantafyllidou (my northern counterweight), Lefteris V. Tserkezis (scholar and gentleman).

Jimmy Liu: Had just been permabanned when I wrote the piece. Robert Todd had just asked me whether it was common practice for Quorans to disappear, as if the Black Maria had carted them off in the middle of the night.

Michael Masiello: familiar with the Classics, among his manifold other fields of literary knowledge. Ergo, clad in a toga (as befits a student of the classics) and a beret (as befits a scholar). Magister Optimus: best of teachers.

Robert Todd: I hadn’t noticed the tiny goatee at the time I drew this. Elegantiae arbiter: arbiter of elegance; a shoutout to the Classics (it was the nickname of Gaius Petronius Arbiter), and to Robert’s own sly, well-read discernment.

Lyonel Perabo: a Frenchman transplanted to Norway, and fitting in all too well. If he fit in any better, as he said to me, skis would have to start growing out of his shoes.

Zeibura S. Kathau: keeps saying he’s an amateur linguist. He isn’t. He isn’t an amateur DJ either.

Lara Novakov: Nole is a Serbian nickname not just for people called Novak (e.g. Djokovic), but for people called something like Novak. Novakov, for instance. So whenever Lara gets in trouble with the mods, #freelaranole

Aziz Dida: Is a doctor in Kosovo; calls himself a neighbour when asking questions about neighbouring countries (including Greece). Asks a lot of very good questions.

Philip Newton: was the only Quoran I knew before Quora; gave me lots of encouragement at the start. Lives in Germany, so he doesn’t smile.

Dan Holliday: posts a lot to explain the US perspective on things. Hence the perched bald eagle.

Joachim Pense: is meticulous and does not let me get away with inaccuracies. Lives in Germany, so he doesn’t smile.

Brian Collins: is on track to move to Melbourne.

Dimitra Triantafyllidou: has become my Quora Nemesis, in the best way possible. She’s from northern Greece, I’m from southern Greece.

Linguā anglicā: “Key to renowned (female) Quorans”

I have taken to cartooning Quorans I like and banter with. Both the cartoons and the banter feature jocular references that may not be immediately obvious to outsiders, who can only judge from the Quorans’ profile pic. (Often enough, the profile pic is all I have to go on to.)

Herewith, a key to my in-joke references, which gives me a good excuse to link-love Quorans some more. Depictions drawn from profile pics are not further explained.

I love youse women

So, to: Sierra Spaulding (wield the sword); Jordan Yates (holding Yorick the Skull); Gigi J Wolf (La Gigi!); McKayla Kennedy (McDoodles!); Clarissa Lohr (estimegata malsamideano); Tracey Bryan (Traaaace!); Pegah Esmaili (canım! PUT DOWN THE POTATO CHIP!); Laura Hale (more Numbers please); Kelley Spartiatis (the Virgin-Voiced Scouse); Irene Colthurst (Doctor of Americana); Audrey Ackerman (Jane Marr!); Josephine Stefani (Spirit Sister! Prost!); Sophia de Tricht (*please don’t hurt me*); Jae Alexis Lee (I hate it when she’s right, which is all the fricking time); Mary C. Gignilliat (Lady X[XX]),

Sierra Spaulding: after recent saddening vicissitudes, has changed her profile pic to an angel with a sword. I approve this message (and this sword).

Sierra may or may not be holding a doobie, and may or may not have a hemp design on her skirt.

Jordan Yates: is learning to be a theatre teacher in college. Wears cat leggings. Names things in her life randomly; hence Yorick the Skull. No, I did not intend for her to look just like my drawing of Michael J. McFadden. Sorry, Jordan. I did say I can’t draw for shit.

Gigi J Wolf: her narratives are so much larger than life; of course I’m going to call her La Gigi. Gigi transports her dog Sugar in a stroller-like contraption. Sometimes successfully.

McKayla Kennedy: is a genuinely awesome, thoughtful soul, but once you’ve seen one McDoodle drawing, you’ll never go back. I’m still encouraging her to blog them all in one place.

Clarissa Lohr: Esperantist and, as her German bio puts it, a filthy Left/Green do-gooder. (I think that’s German for SJW.) Esperantists corresponding with each other would write Estimata samideano, “Esteemed (= dear) same-thinker”. I’m calling her Most Esteemed Different-Thinker: I have benefited greatly from debates with her.

She’s German, so she doesn’t smile.

Tracey Bryan: Tracey has a strong Australian accent, and an informal Australian manner. To me, she cannot be anyone but Traaaace.

Pegah Esmaili: I keep being pleasantly surprised at how similar Turkish is to Pegah’s native Azeri. Therefore, Pegah being such a hardcore scary heavy metal scowling goth misandrist (complete with army boots), it delights me to call her canım “my soul”, an old-fashioned Turkic term of endearment. (It’s from Persian, which also works.)

Pegah has once memorably said that, so long as Iranians don’t diss the authority of the ayatollahs, they couldn’t care less if you worshipped a potato chip. Pegah may or may not be holding up a banner depicting a holy potato chip (چیپز).

Kelley Spartiatis: Her actual Greek given name, to her annoyance, is Parthenope. I dug up that this is Homeric Greek for “Voice of a Maiden”. Or “Virgin”, which means she’s been named after Madonna. Kelley is a foul-mouthed ray of sunshine from Liverpool, and is showing a friendly middle finger of greeting.

Irene Colthurst: has a profound and encyclopaedic knowledge of American politics, and must be read by everyone ever.

Audrey Ackerman: went by Jane Marr before the Real Name bot got to her. Her profile pic is a ladybug, but at least she has an internet connection and some linguistics books, so it’s OK.

Josephine Stefani: has an Armenian boyfriend. I have an Armenian wife. Therefore, I proclaimed, we must be spirit siblings, and we must toast to the occasion. She is helpfully holding a bottle of Ararat brandy.

Sophia de Tricht: ex-military, still scary.

Jae Alexis Lee: has schooled me extensively, whether she realises it or not.

Mary C. Gignilliat: She is holding a rake, because she works in landscaping, and she’s got devil horns, because her dad said she has a devilish glint in her eyes. The depiction has absolutely nothing to do with her most popular subject matter.

Ah, a lot of doom and gloom here from other respondents.

I’ll admit that all I know about Shetland is that they have ponies, and all I know about Orkney is “huh, isn’t that halfway to Norway already?” But I knew Norn existed. I’ve had a quick look at Wikipedia (and pasted links in details).

And I’ll post not specifics (a Shetlander or Orcadian will need to supply those); but some questions to ask, and some stuff I’ve gleaned from both reading, and a friend working on language reclamation here in Australia.

Will you get the kind of revival that Hebrew had? Of course not. The Jews of Palestine spoke different languages, and even when they didn’t, they were strongly motivated to abandon their native languages. The Ottomans and British weren’t coercing their language onto the Jews of Palestine. The kibbutzim were like the plantations that pidgins developed in, only not coercive.

Obviously, that’s not happening in Norn territory. Everyone speaks English, everyone will keep speaking English, and a revived Norn would only ever be a part-time hobby thing.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s nothing not real about that. But let’s stop comparing Norn to Hebrew, as the measure of a successful revival case. The proper comparison is with Cornish. (Which features in How many dead languages have successfully been revived as spoken languages of a group of people in the modern world?) And Cornish has not been an utter failure; people speak it and write it. Even if it is more emblematic than anything else in Cornwall.

So. Can Nynorn get to the status of Cornish? Well, let’s see.

• It’ll need strong Shetlander/Orcadian nationalism. Strong enough for people to see the point in investing their time, seeking each other out to chat, organise cultural revival festivals featuring it, memorise the Hildina ballad (the one surviving non-trivial text). Nynorn needs to be the vehicle of a culture: it needs to motivate people.
• I don’t know whether there is strong Shetlander/Orcadian nationalism. Without it, the revival’s going to be pretty damn marginal.
• The naysayers on the forums, though, and anyone speaking of utility, can kiss my conlanger tuchus. Noone’s putting a gun to their head to learn Nynorn. Or French for that matter. If they think it’s a waste of time, they can go have a party with all the shmucks who are aghast I’d spent time on Klingon. As long as they don’t get in the way of anyone who does want to learn Nynorn.
• It does NOT need a huge well-documented corpus of original Norn. Which is just as well, ’cause we don’t have one.
• Yes, Nynorn is going to be a linguistic fiction, based on analogy with Faroese to fill in the blanks. Big deal. Cornish Mark #1 used Breton to fill in the blanks. Australian languages get revived based on a couple of scrappy word lists and triangulation.
• The point is not that Nynorn be a completely historically accurate replica of 16th century Norn. The point is that it be good enough to be serviceable to the community. There are Aboriginal communities who were quite content with getting just a dozen words back, to inject into their Aboriginal English: it was enough for their purposes.
• The error of Cornish (leading to Cornish Mark #2 and Cornish Mark #3) was thinking it needed to be more and more historically accurate. Why? You’re not going in a time machine any time soon. Language revival does not need to go all Jurassic Park. If you can understand the Hildina and can still talk in Nynorn about buying a pint of lager and a pony (or whatever it is people talk about over there), you’re good. The perfect must not be allowed to be the enemy of the good.
• My friend was skipping the ergative in her revivals, because the tribe she was working with couldn’t get their heads around it. The linguists shook their heads. But my friend wasn’t doing the revival work for the linguists, or for herself (who, after all, knew perfectly well what an ergative is). She was doing it for the community. And it does the community no good if you revive a language for them, that they can’t wrap their heads around.
• Dialects get in the way, because revival is only practical around a single standard.
• Promoting standard forms of Irish and Scots Gaelic through the radio actually backfired: the native speakers of Irish and Gaelic got even more disheartened, because they found that not only was their mountain gibberish not the Queen’s English, it wasn’t even the Queen’s Celtic. A Greek dialectologist like me is not going to be grateful to the Greek government for sending teachers to the Ukraine: it’s not like they’re sent to teach the version of Greek that’s actually spoken there.
• And of course, if the revival is to be driven by local pride, picking a non-local dialect is going to be a funny way for the locals to show pride.
• That won’t be as much of an issue for Nynorn, because noone has spoken Norn for a couple of centuries. But Orkney Norn and Shetland Norn look very different; and imposing a single Nynorn over both might be a bad idea, especially if the locals know that Orkney Norn and Shetland Norn look very different. (I have no idea if that’s what’s happening.)

Flag of Orkney.

Flag of Shetland.

Shetland ponies in Shetland.