Month: November 2016

As mentioned in many other recent questions on this, Quora has tinkered with its grammar bot in the past month, and lots of questions are being dinged that only a robot would find objectionable.

I’m getting these too. All I can say is, I randomly reword and keep trying; and avoid anything syntactically complex. I have had the Quora Bot and QCR edit war at least once: What does the Balkan phrase “nemo laffe” mean?

As Ayse Temmuz said, this has been gone over very often.

Let’s go through the pairs.

• Armenia–Azerbaijan. I’m married to a diaspora Armenian, which means I know very little of Armenia. We spent 3 days in and around Yerevan during our honeymoon last year. And that was enough to convince me there’ll be war again soon. That enmity is live.
• Armenia–Turkey. The hostility is live as well, though not on a war footing. The sheep are only wandering into no-mans land at Khor Virap because they don’t know what guns are. The genocide is a big part of why the hostility is fresh on the Armenian side; I can’t speak to the Turkish side.
• Greece–Azerbaijan. I don’t think Greeks know enough about Azeris to hate them. I’m assuming vice versa.
• Greece–Turkey. Ah, Greece–Turkey. The reason is not just Cyprus or the Istanbul pogroms or the massacres in Chios and Tripolitsa. The reason is that Greeks and Turks have defined themselves in opposition to each other for the past millennium, around their creed. (That’s how the Turkic emirates and the Byzantine Empire did business, and the Ottoman Empire enshrined it in the millet system.) They’ve defined themselves as such, in fact, at the expense of their own ethnicities.
• And yet, since the earthquake diplomacy thing, that hostility has mostly gone away. There’s some residual unease; I suspect there always will be. But there are Ottomanists in Greece now, and experts on Ottoman art music. They simply did not exist 30 years ago. (Turks will need to let me know if there’s been something similar on their side. Ömer Aygün does Aristotle, but that’s Yunan, not Rum 🙂 )

Andreas Jucker seems to be the guy that single handedly conjured this field into being, including the journal and the collection of essays in the late 90s. (I think I reviewed it way back then.) Namechecked at Historical pragmatics – Wikipedia

UZH – English Department

Ah, bugger. He’s the Dean of Arts at Zurich U. No more research out of him, then.

No, I’m not going to read 111 answers to see if someone has already said this.

We live in an age where stirring controversy seems to be require you to be a Circumcellion: you have to actively provoke people for them to get mad at you.

A Traveller Way-Laid:

Here’s an exception.

Smokers.

Yeah, yeah, I don’t smoke, I have a history of bronchitis, disclaimer disclaimer, whatever.

Smokers are not vermin.

Smokers are not my enemy.

Smokers are not hitting me with a club, yelling LAUDATE DEUM and begging me to martyr them.

I rather enjoy passive smoking with my European mates. In theory, because in practice they’ve all scattered, and it’s actually rather difficult for me to get passive smoking anywhere in Melbourne.

And yes, that’s an acutely controversial statement in most circles I know.

—MJM, this one’s for you.

To add to Andrei Stoica’s answer—

(Vote #1: User. This is a supplementary answer)

—Byzantines often used Turkish mercenaries, as Andrei pointed out, especially when they went nuts and fought civil wars in the 14th century that only the Ottomans could benefit from. And after the civil wars washed up, and Byzantines were a vassal state of the Ottomans, Byzantines fought as vassals of the Ottomans. But that wasn’t even an alliance, let along an “on the same team”, that was just work for hire.

Like Andrei said: no, never.

(Please read Andrei Stoica’s answer btw. Vote #1: User.)

Because Latin was always better known in the West than Greek. Greek proverbial expressions are almost uniformly quoted in the West in Latin; e.g. Deus ex machina, not apo mēchanēs theos; Et tu Brute, not kai sy teknon; quod erat demonstrandum, not hoper edei deixai.

Gnothi seauton seems to be as prevalent as nosce te ipsum for Know thyself, if you add up transliterations and Greek script on the Googles.

In I love youse guys, I praised all the great Quorans I had come to admire and love in my first nine months here.

I will now do the same for the next five months, with all the new friends and admirees I have made since.

To Jeremy Markeith 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):

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

I love youse guys.

Not seeing why the question should be restricted to Spanish. Counterexamples not mentioned so far:

• Bulgarian: Varna, not Sofia.
• Macedonian: Ohrid, not Skopje.
• Germany: Saxony, not Berlin or Vienna. (And in the Middle Ages, Swabia, not Saxony.)
• Greek: Koine, but basically Peloponnesian, not Old Athenian.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, tuning up. From the best seats I’ve ever had in a concert: choir stalls.

This was the performance of Mahler’s 6th during which my wife, somehow, fell asleep. Much to Victoria Weaver’s merriment.

Nick. From Greek Nikolaos, Victory of the People. The name shows up in antiquity, in its Attic variant Nikoleōs, and got enshrined among Greeks via Saint Nicholas. Too vernacular for the late Byzantine historian Chalkokondyles, who flipped his first name around to Laonikos.

Nicolaus in Latin, Nicolas in French and Middle English, as featured in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. When the Renaissance came, English scribes realised French had taken out a few Greek h’s. So they put h’s in everywhere. Including Nicholas.

Uri Granta informs me that the Hebrew equivalent is Amichai: If you were to Hebraize your surname, what would you choose? A blessing upon his house: it’s certainly a cooler name than Victor.

Nick Nicholas. See Nick Nicholas’ answer to How did your parents decide on your name? for the story there.

For an added bonus, the surnames of my four grandparents.

Father’s Father: Hadjimarcou. Of Mark the Pilgrim

FM: Haralambous. Of Haralambos, “Shining with Joy” (a saint’s name)

MF: Lykakis. Wolf-son. -akis is the now obligatory Cretan patronymic suffix.

MM: Sfendourakis. Slingshot-son.