Month: November 2016

Not… feeling it with these answers. Not putting themselves enough in the homophobe’s shoes, I believe.

I think Sophia de Tricht’s is the closest to the answer I’m about to offer, but her answer was pretty epigrammatic.

Consider this: Habib Fanny’s answer to Why do social conservatives care if gay people can marry or trans people can change their names? If they claim to be against government intervention, why don’t they just leave people alone?

A closely related question. From someone who (as Clarissa Lohr just put it to me in a different context) is a bridge: Habib has been on both sides of a culturally divisive issue. And he’s not even invoking God here.

The idea is that these issues are not a matter of identity but a matter of deviancy. Deviancy must be checked because otherwise a society loses its moral compass. And the loss of a moral compass is the death knell of a society. I mean, look at Rome! They were so deviant that they ran their entire civilization into the ground.

Of course, all of this is bollocks. It’s nothing more than people imposing their own narrow-minded sense of morality on an entire population on the pretense that civilization would otherwise collapse. But I hope you understand the thought process behind it a bit better after reading this.

What joy do homophobic people find when they’re being homophobic?

They think they’re saving the world.

Are you scratching your head and muttering? Go ahead. But if you want to know what a homophobe gets out of homophobia, surely you have to get inside their head.

In my last lecture of Historical Linguistics, I brought in a guest lecturer, a fellow PhD student, who was an ardent Nostraticist. I hadn’t discussed Nostratic with him for years. To my astonishment, I watched him recant Nostratic right before my eyes. And the way he did it was by making fun of Starostin et al., grasping for cognates.

What do *I* think about Nostratic? It’s plausible, and it uses the comparative method, which the long range Greenbergian macrofamilies do not. It’s not generally accepted, and the scepticism is warranted given the time depth and the likelihood of noise in the data. Unproven, but wouldn’t be horrified if it turned out true. But hard to see, given current attitudes and the tenuousness of the relations, what it would take for to be proven true…

I got thunderstorm asthma (who even knew that was a thing?), so I sympathise, Chad.

But not enough not to come up with my own parasitic rendering. Ha!

I’m going with your initial instinct:

Ne heri hodie destruat.

Subjunctives. They are cool.

My bio for Esperanto says Kabeinta Esperantisto, lingvisto: “Esperantist who has done a Kabe, linguist” (for explanation on Kabe, see question details). So I guess I qualify to answer.

I have been corresponding with Clarissa Lohr a fair bit in Esperanto recently. I don’t think that means I’ve un-Kabe’d though; Clarissa is hardly a verda batalanto. She is a Green Warrior, but that’s Green as in hair colour, the environment, and Social Justice, not Green as in Sub la sankta signo de l’ espero (La Espero).

So, how does it feel to have abandoned the Esperanto movement?

Guilt, mostly. Not debilitating guilt like I feel for Lojban (where I was a much bigger deal, as it was a much smaller group). But guilt. They were my people, and I did not stick by them.

Also: Surprise, when I see the language has moved on past me. I Kabe’d in the 90s, distracted by shinier objects (Lojban, then Klingon); Esperanto went off and coined new Esperanto slang. Without my permission. The nerve!

But Esperanto made me, in a lot of ways. Not least of which was poetics. And I’m grateful for that, forever.

Preamble:

I AM NOT SAYING THIS JUST TO IMPRESS User.

Ahem.

Um, nah. It’s not objectively ugly. What name is? It’s just a bunch of phonemes. Is Melanie ugly, because it sounds like melanoma? Is Mycroft ugly, because it sounds like Microsoft?

Any ugliness we associate with names is cultural. And what’s an Anya ever done to you?

I could put in an anecdote about an Anya my wife studied with; but Quora is googleable, so I’ll pass.

What Anya is though, is unfamiliar in an English-language environment. If an English-speaking shmuck in high school hears an unfamiliar name, of course they’re going to scramble to find things about it to make fun of. Because they’re shmucks.

Now, pronouncing it as “Awnya” instead of “Ahnya”: that, I might take issue with…

Vote #1 Colin Jensen and Joe Fessenden, who have nailed it.

To add a bit.

It is the height of arrogance to fast forward to Modern Greek. But I’ll do so anyway.

In Modern Greek, the adjective askhimos < askhēmōn means ‘ugly’.

The etymology of askhēmōn is ‘un-shape-ish’. So unshapely, not with a nice shape. Deformed, as Thayer’s Lexicon put it. Not pleasant to look at.

The verb askhēmonein means ‘to act in an unshapely manner’. To act ugly. In a way that is not pleasant to experience.

You need to dig beneath the Olde English of unbecomingly, unseemly. They are correct, but you may well miss the connotations because they are Olde English. To act unbecomingly mean acting in a socially unacceptable way. It is a socially ugly way.

From the Byzantine usage I’ve seen, I’m pretty sure that includes behaviour which society (at the time) condemned as lewd, sexually ill-disciplined. But it’s not just about the sex, it’s about the ugliness.

FWIW, the LSJ (Classical Greek) definition of the verb is ‘behave unseemly, disgrace oneself’.

Um… positivity?

… You’ve A2A’d the right guy, Diane? OK. I’m a misery guts, but I appreciate the challenge!

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It was my honeymoon, last year. For her sins, I dragged my honey to my home town in Greece. I wanted her to know where I grew up.

I hadn’t been back in six years; and I hadn’t gotten to properly explore it on my previous visits back. I was trying to recapture what it was like thirty years ago, for my honey. But it kept slipping through my fingers. It seems so much smaller. Much more sullen—not just because it was in winter, but it was in the winter of Greece, resigned after years of economic crisis. The town has grown; but it seemed to me to have grown hollow.

I was dejected.

My honey instinctively knew the answer.

She took me to an eatery. Not a tourist place; a hole in the wall place, with an Asterix shopfront.

And top of the menu in the eatery is the homeliest, most unpretentious, most quotidian of dishes a Greek knows. Makaronia me kima. Spag bol. Steaming, with mincemeat, and grated white cheese.

Thank you, honey.

You can go back home, after all.

Am I surprised?

Well, let me put up my latest reaction when I discovered a correspondent was a teen. And she’s been very, very far from the first:

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-eve…

> Anyway, with regard to your question: I am seventeen, so only a year older than you.

OH FOR MOTHER FUCK’S SAKE!

ANOTHER BRILLIANT TEENAGER ON QUORA!

What is it in the water these days?! I was convinced you were in your thirties.

(That was intended as a compliment btw. But yes, I am shocked.)

Dr Nick. Smooth as ever.

But yes, I am surprised.

There’s a great old Greek expression “your brains have not yet congealed” (δεν έπηξε ακόμα το μυαλό σου), meaning that you don’t yet have the impulse control or “maturity” of an adult. Unfortunately neurology confirms that impulse control doesn’t settle until one’s mid twenties. Which is why Australians will maliciously say that a computer program “crashes more often than a 20-year old in a [Ford] Commodore”.

I will say that I very occasionally espy some elements of emotional immaturity among the intellectual teens I follow here. (And it reassures me when that does happen, that I’m not caught in some Hyperborean simulacrum.) But it’s actually quite rare. Quite astonishingly rare.

Thx4A2A, Irene. I’d say that in Armenian, but my wife doesn’t speak it. 🙁

This is a painful question for me, as I was an Esperantist for a fair while.

But even before the Espereantists split about whether the “final victory” was worth messianically waiting for, they were very careful not to convey a message that Esperanto would displace ethnic languages (even though, if the hegemony of the final victory ever happened, that would be the expected outcome). Esperanto was always meant to be a second language only.

I won’t address the fact that the hypothetical is implausible, that a common language would not unite all people, as proven by every civil war ever.

I will say that my identity as an English-speaker and a Greek-speaker is definitional to me, and I will not wish to relinquish it.

The march of technology means that we’re going to see similar challenges to our identities within our lifetimes, even if not this one. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be on the wrong side of those challenges, myself.

Vote #1 Emre Sermutlu’s answer. Because I’m just some random Greek. Emre Sermutlu’s answer to Why hasn’t Turkey adopted federalism if it is big enough and divided into seven regions?

Turkish Quorans may know me as an interested neighbour (Greek). Being Greek, the para about Turks being forced on the defensive in Emre’s answer is one that of course I’m going to disagree with. The Young Turks were plenty nationalistic on their own. The real point was that both the Young Turks and the Greeks and Armenians were not prepared to live together in a multiethnic Ottoman Empire—even if it was no longer one where the Muslims were privileged.

But with the overall tenor of Emre’s answer, of course I agree:

Different groups must like each other enough to be the part of the same structure, yet they must feel [my edit] different enough to warrant their own sub-structure.

And of course, there’s a third component. The ruling class of the country must not feel threatened by the difference of groups in the structure.

The guys in Trabzon, who Emre says will beat you up if you advocate for their autonomy, would also be sympathetic to the stunting of Turkish dialectology until fairly recently in Turkey: “There are no dialects of Turkish! There is only Turkish!”

And before anyone says anything, Greece has long done exactly the same thing.