Trump is, of course, only a symptom of a worldwide populist revolt, on both the right and the left, against elites and bien-pensant liberalism. Expect to find a lot of both political and linguistic propriety jetissoned. Expect much more coarseness and braggadocio in public discourse. But the speech now being “uncovered” was always there.
Month: December 2016
Was the Ottoman empire the ISIS of the 14th century?
Matthew Franklin, Jakub Handlíř and Tomas Rocha Martins are completely correct.
If you’re looking for an equivalent to ISIS in the 13th or 14th century, you’re looking for an agent that is not abiding by the then extant international rules of conduct, and that is reviled universally, by coreligionists and outsiders alike, as being beyond the pale.
The Ottomans started as ghazis, so they were more aggressive about their expansion than Muslims had been recently. But they were not aliens from a different planet, the way ISIS is to everyone else.
ISIS is also small, but I don’t think that’s a useful differentiator. Osman’s emirate of Bithynia started out pretty small too.
The closest equivalent, I’ll suggest, is Genghis Khan.
EDIT: Dimitris Almyrantis is right in comments: it’s the Assassins. And Dimitris, post more about the Kharijy?
The phrase “everyone’s entitled to their opinion” annoys me. What can I do?
There are people on this thread who are calling you a snob, too.
Screw ’em.
You have an aesthetic. You have a grounding for that aesthetic, that you can (I hope) articulate and defend. Hopefully, it’s an aesthetic that’s also aware of its own contingency and situatedness, and has no pretensions of immutable truth.
People like films for their own reasons, and that’s fine. Someone’s got to buy tickets for Transformers and Finding Dory and the ten gajillion different comic book films out there, after all. People are entitled to their own preferences, and their own aesthetics, even.
And you’re still entitled to say you know stuff about how film works, that they don’t. That you can see things going on that they don’t, and that you catch innovations and derivativeness that they can’t. You can still judge art without succumbing to some levelling miasma of “everything is valid, screw your training”.
Seriously. As I’ve posted elsewhere: I had no idea what the local metal music radio show was talking about, when they were saying that group A was brutal and amazing, and group B was derivative and ridiculous. They both sounded like noise to me. But the fact that they could make that discernment reassured me. It confirmed to me that they had an aesthetics, and that its subject matter was art.
“You can’t judge other people’s works of art, man” is not an aesthetics.
And if you’re annoyed by “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion”?
Say what the great wrestler Jerry Lawler once said.
Well, you’re entitled to your opinion.
AND EVERYBODY’S ENTITLED TO MY OPINION!
Should I take that some Cypriot Greek speakers do call Pounds sterling as “λίρες εγγλέζικες” (English pounds) because the notes…?
Cypriots refer to English pounds, for the simple reason that colloquial Greek refers to English rather than British exclusively. Note that your phrase uses the colloquial εγγλέζικη, rather than the formal αγγλική for “English”.
The formation of the United Kingdom never made much of a popular impression on Greeks. In fact even in more formal Greek, the British rule of Cyprus is referred to as the Anglocracy, Αγγλοκρατία, not the Brettanocracy.
How much of a text by Aristotle or Procopius would speakers of modern Greek get?
Nick, what are you doing responding to this question?! You’re a PhD in Greek linguistics, with 18 years of working at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae!
Yes, but I never did formally study Ancient Greek. And I know enough linguistics that I can filter out stuff about Ancient Greek that I’m not supposed to know.
Aristotle:
About that poetics and its kinds, whatever power each kind has, and how myths should be put together if poetry is to have (?) well, and moreover how many particles and of what sort it is made of, and similarly about everything else this is of that method: let us speak of these, starting as is natural with first things first.
[I deliberately missed “poetry per se” in ποιητικῆς αὐτῆς, left “myth” as a faux ami, and ignored “have well” = “turn out well” (and you’d need high school Ancient Greek to know the future tense of “have” at all).]
There’ll be a couple of words to trip over, but an educated Modern Greek speaker will understand the essence of it unaided. I’m deliberately not polishing it further.
Procopius: Justinian was greedy for money, and was so inappropriately (?) a lover of other people’s things (wives?), that all of the gold that was subject to him he would sell to the administrators of the authorities, to those who elect (?) taxes, and to those who wish to stitch together evil designs towards people for no good reason.
[ἐραστής is begging to be misconstrued as “sexual lover”. ἐκλέγουσι is actually obscure to me in this context, and I’m not heading to a dictionary. The “gold subject to him”, the Latin tells me, really is “the gold of his subjects”.]
Slightly more obscure, but again, an educated Modern Greek speaker will understand the essence of it.
Now. Ask me what a peasant would have made of this 200 years ago, and you’d have a very different answer.
How many Quora superstars (10K+ followers) do you know of (whether or not you follow them)?
OP.
Rahul’s list being a year old, it excludes Jordan Yates and Annika Schauer. But that’s OK, I did want a neutral common reference.
Rahul has 153 people. I will not include celebrities from whom I’ve never seen a post (such as Vint Cerf).
- Jimmy Wales – 178K+
- Adam D’Angelo – 143K+
- Balaji Viswanathan – 140K+
- Robert Frost – 103K+
- Oliver Emberton – 81K+
- Marc Bodnick – 59K+
- Marcus Geduld – 55K+
- Brian Bi – 48K+
- Dan Holliday – 42K+
- Feifei Wang – 34K+
- Ellen Vrana – 34K+
- Joshua Engel – 33K+
- Garrick Saito – 28K+
- Richard Muller – 26K+
- Jon Davis – 25K+
- Jay Wacker – 25K+
- Stephanie Vardavas – 22K+
- Jon Mixon – 22K+
- Barry Hampe – 18K+
- Paul Denlinger – 18K+
- Peter Flom – 17K+
- Noam Kaiser – 16K+
- Erica Friedman – 15K+
- Claire J. Vannette – 15K+
- Jonathan Brill – 14K+
- Joseph Boyle – 14K+
- Jonas Mikka Luster – 14K+
- John Burgess – 14K+
- Melissa Stroud – 13K+
- Sabrina Deep – 13K+
- Eva Kor – 12K+
- Kelsey L. Hayes – 12K+
- Diana Crețu – 12K+
- Eivind Kjørstad – 12K+
- Tim O’Neill – 11K+
- Judith Meyer – 11K+
- Tatiana Estévez – 11K+
- Craig Good – 10K+
- David Stewart – 10K+
- Peter Baskerville – 10K+
So that’s only 1/3 of them that I’ve noticed here.
UPDATE, given Edward Conway’s answer.
I follow: 0
I like: 11
I dislike: 9. To date I’ve blocked 1.
UPDATE, 3 months later. I follow 1. I have blocked 2.
How heated was the Greek Language Question?
If you don’t know about the Greek language question, look at the link: this won’t really make sense otherwise.
Neeraj Mathur asked in comments to Nick Nicholas’ answer to Who were the biggest enemies of Greek?
So in a sense, the Katharevousa partisans would have portrayed the Demotic advocates as the enemies of Greek heritage, while the other side would see them as the enemies of Greek folk culture. How heated was the actual debate?
Enough for people to be killed. 8 demonstrators in the Gospel riots in 1901 (protesting a translation of the Gospel of Matthew into the vernacular), and 2 demonstrators in the Orestes riots (Ορεστειακά) of 1903 (protesting the translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia into the vernacular).
Of course, as with any such organised violent conflict, other stuff was going on; Greece had been militarily humiliated in 1897 by the Ottomans, Greece was panicked about Bulgarian encroachment to its north, and the Gospel translation was sponsored by Queen Olga, who was Russian. So, Hey Presto, moral panic: “the Russians are undermining our religion to turn us into Slavs”, combined somehow with “the Protestants are out to deracinate us” (since the translator lived in Liverpool, and there had been Protestant missionary activity in Greece for decades).
Now, this is not how a Diglossia is supposed to work. In normal diglossias, like you get in Egypt or Haiti or, for that matter, Greek in Cyprus, you have a Low variant and a High variant, people know when to use which, and it’s just the way things are done. That’s what Greece was like up to 1880. (Not the Ionian Islands though, which used the vernacular in literature, and were not in Greece until 1864.)
And the ideology was pretty universally respected: Puristic Greek would efface the orientalist shame of the vernacular, and restore Greek to something more respectable, though not as a full revival of Ancient Greek. (That made Puristic a quite unstable compromise, varying by author, and adrift between Koine and Mediaeval Greek.)
That started breaking down in the 1870s, with Valaoritis’ vernacular patriotic poetry being given official recognition. It blew up with activists in the 1880 and 1890s, of whom Psichari was only the loudest. And the dispute then was ideological, as Neeraj guessed: “enemies of our Hellenic heritage” vs “enemies of our Romaic heritage”.
Add to that though that Psichari was a Neogrammarian: the somersaults that Puristic Greek had to do to compromise between Ancient Greek and the vernacular offended him as a linguist, and he advocated a linguistically consistent morphology and phonology.
If Psichari sounds ridiculously folksy to modern speakers, it’s not because he was linguistically wrong: Standard Greek phonetics is utterly ridiculous because of its spelling pronunciations of ancient Greek. It’s because Psichari was sociolinguistically clueless (not helped by the fact that he did not live in Greece). The next generation of activists, such as Triantafyllidis and Tzartzanos, were more sociolinguistically aware, and advocated a vernacular closer to what is used now, with more concessions towards Puristic.
By their time, Demotic was universally used in literature; and the Greek diglossia was derailed: it was now a competition between two norms, Puristic and Demotic, for the status of High language. And with Demotic universal in literature, Puristic was on the back foot—though it remained universal in government and the church).
In Psichari’s generation, the conflict was Hellenic vs Romaic, but it was not yet Left vs Right. Psichari himself was a royalist; the early Communist Party dismissed the Language Question as a bourgeois distraction. And though “enemies of our Hellenic heritage” nowadays sounds reactionary, at the time it was introduced in the 1810s, Puristic was actually a vehicle of the Enlightenment, and seen as progressive.
By the 1920s, though, Puristic vs Demotic had settled into Right Wing vs Left Wing. People could work out your political persuasion in Greece, by whether you used the 1st declension or the 3rd declension in your genitives of –is nouns.
No, I am not exaggerating: I lived in Greece at the very tail end of that language feeling, and an -εως genitive still makes me wince. It’s one of the many conflicts Dimitra Triantafyllidou and I delight in having. And hey, it’s better than Turkey, where the political shibboleth was the shape of your moustache.
What killed Puristic in the end was the 1967 dictatorship’s reactionary enthusiasm for it: when democracy was restored, Puristic was dispensed with in government with universal revulsion. What replaced it of course was not Psichari’s ideal; the Constitution even warns that Demotic shall be adopted “without extremist features”. And the flavours of Standard Greek that have prevailed have waxed and waned in their archaisms in the decades since. But Greek has mostly settled down into normal registers, rather than street fighting conflict.
Who were the biggest enemies of Greek?
Originally asked: Who were the biggest enemies of Greek?
Austin R. Justice writes in his excellent answer (Vote #1 Austin R. Justice’s answer to Who were the biggest enemies of Greek? ):
I’m going to assume that you meant “enemies of the Greeks” or “of Greece.” Personally, I don’t know anyone opposed to the language!
The biggest enemies of Greek are, of course, those endless generations of British public school students before you, Austin, who had no real choice as to whether or not they were subjected to the rigours of the Ancient Greek verb system. The ones who were boxed around the ears by their masters, to the sound of “THERE IS NO FUTURE SUBJUNCTIVE!”
Joke’s on them, btw.
Nicholas, Nick. 2008. The passive future subjunctive in Byzantine texts : Byzantinische Zeitschrift. Volume 101, Issue 1, Pages 89–131.
As for the possibly intended question “Who were the biggest enemies of the Greeks”:
The Primordial Enemy for the past 200-odd years have of course been the Turks.
Recentism has effaced the fact that 500 years ago, there was probably more resentment about the Venetians than the Turks among the peasantry in the Greek islands. The Ottomans may have imposed a capital tax and recruited Janissaries, which provoked plenty of hatred; but they did not institute corvée, and they left the Orthodox senior clergy alone.
Recentism also is foregrounding the Germans, but that’s pretty superficial. (He says, from a safe Antipodean distance.) There is an undercurrent of grudging admiration for Germans too. The 2 AM to 4 AM guard watch in the army is colloquially known as “The German Watch”—since you’d have to be a German Übermensch to deal with doing guard duty at that ungodly hour.
Who is your favorite musical composer (1500-now)? And why?
I am on a lifelong mission to annoy Victoria Weaver by saying:
MAHLER!!!!
But if I’m to be completely honest, it’s Bach.
Mahler, because of the cathartic emotional extremes, the amazing orchestrations, the largescale forms, the cogent narratives.
Bach above Mahler, because of the sublime joining of intellect and passion, and (I hate to admit) because it can communicate to you even if you aren’t paying rapt attention (which is why I default to it at work).
Which language is older, Persian or Arabic?
Mehrdad, unlike the other respondents, I will disappoint you with a meta-answer. But it is the truer answer.
There’s no such thing as an older language.
Let me transpose the question to Iberia. People often say, “Woah, man, Basque is like, the oldest language in Europe, man! It’s like, as old as the Cro-Magnon!”
That’s crap. Basque is as old as Spanish is.
“But 2500 years ago, they didn’t even speak Spanish, man! They spoke, like, Latin!”
Yes. And 2500 years ago, they didn’t speak Basque either. They spoke Aquitanian language. Which was the ancestor of Basque.
“But man, they didn’t speak Latin in Iberia, man! They spoke that in Italy! And they totally spoke Aqui… Accu… Aquaman in Iberia, man!”
Yes, but you didn’t say “what is the longest continuously spoken language family in Iberia, without involving major territorial changes.” You said “oldest language”. And Basque is no older than Spanish in that regard. There was an ancestor of Spanish spoken 5000 years ago (somewhere far to the east), and there was an ancestor of Basque spoken 5000 years ago (maybe closer to Spain, maybe not).
So. Same for Farsi and Arabic.
- In 600 BC, we have in inscriptions in Old Persian, which is an ancestor of Farsi. (But is not, itself, Farsi.)
- Much later, in 150 BC, we have Pahlavi texts in Middle Persian, which is a closer ancestor of Farsi. (But it is still not, itself, Farsi.)
- At around 150 BC, we have the first indications of Arabic, as names embedded in texts in the Nabataean language. So we know that Old Arabic was spoken in 150 BC. (But Old Arabic is not, itself, Quranic or Modern Arabic)
So, OK, Old Persian is older than Old Arabic. But Arabic did not drop out of the skies into Nabataean. At around 600 BC, people were speaking an ancestor of Arabic. Something *like* Dadanitic (though probably not Dadanitic itself).
So you tell me:
- 600 BC: Old Persian — Dadanitic
- 150 BC: Middle Persian — Old Arabic
- 800 AD: Early Modern Persian — Classical Arabic
- 2000 AD: Farsi — Modern Arabic
Is one older than the other? Why? Because it has the word “Persian” in it? Because it might (*might*, I actually don’t know) have changed slower? But that doesn’t make it older. Old Persian is still not the same as Farsi, any more than Dadanitic is completely different from Modern Arabic.
Do we have more old written literary texts in the Persian branch than in the Central Semitic branch? Sure. But that’s not what “older” means. That’s what “older literary use” would mean.
And FWIW, Dadanitic was spoken in traditional Arabic territory, just like Old Persian was spoken in traditional Farsi territory. So we don’t even have a scenario like Basque vs Spanish, with Latin coming into a new territory.