Originally Answered:

Why do people like to watch The Bachelor?

I’m sure I’ve seen this question somewhere else already, but I’m on my phone, so I won’t go hunting to merge.

The Bachelor draws on a potent combination of factors, although the proportion of factors seems to differ by country. The Australian Bachelor and Bachelorette are very different from the US versions.

• People love to watch a competition. Especially when they can empathize with a competitor. And the editing of reality TV encourages you to empathize with one party and vilify the other. The latest Australian Bachelor was won by if not a villain, certainly not the person edited to look best. I’m still not sure whether that was an act of genius or stupidity.
• People like to watch romance. The audience is very well aware how artificial the romance is, and how it has been gamified. But again, the editing is usually skillful enough to commit some suspension of disbelief. At least, until you get to the group dates. But the group dates are about gladiatorial competition, not romance.
• People like to watch a bunch of attractive people on TV making out. This seems to have been a change of emphasis even between seasons of the American Bachelor, with the latest season doing more sex. Perhaps surprisingly, no sex is allowed on the Australian Bachelor.
• People like to watch car crash TV. That forms a package with the gladiatorial combat aspect of the bachelor. And the producers certainly stoke the mix of paranoia, delusion, competitiveness, and inebriation that leads to car crash TV. Of course many of the competitors are complicit in that, and they know it will get them their own notoriety.

Originally Answered:

Why are there several languages in the world?

Firstly, because we are not even sure that there was monogenesis of language. That is, we are not sure whether language originated in a single contiguous community of humans, or multiple communities.

Second, because like all social phenomena, language is a dynamic system subject to change through conflicting factors. Change at an individual level is moderated through the pressure to retain intelligibility within a community. But if two communities are distinct, there is no longer any pressure for their languages to remain intelligible to each other, and they will end up evolving independently and diverging.

Third, language is one of the primary vehicles of group identity. There is a strong motivation for groups to ensure that their language is distinct from that of rival groups. There is the example I read somewhere of a language in Papua New Guinea which historically seems to have changed all its p’s to k’s. That change makes no sense phonetically, but it makes a lot of sense if you are doing your damnedest not to sound like the next village down the road.

The other answers are correct, but the question goes to something broader. Greek kids will sooner or later find out that a lot of mathematical and scientific symbols used in other languages are Greek, just as they find out that a lot of scientific vocabulary in other languages is Greek.

How do they feel? Unsurprised. They have heard all their lives that Greek culture was the foundation of the West. That their ancestors were building Parthenons when everybody else’s ancestors were eating acorns. Learning about that use of the Greek alphabet just comes to validate that for them.

No, by the way. I don’t think that’s healthy.

You’re not hinting that my last name is unfortunate there, Michael, are you? 🙂

I haven’t suffered all that much for it. Certainly not as much as some respondents. If someone carries on about it, I inwardly (or maybe even not that inwardly) roll my eyes, and move on. I used to be nicknamed Nick Squared, and I took no offence at that. A couple of decades ago, someone said to me that I would not be as obnoxious as I am if I didn’t have that name. I chose to take that as a compliment.

My reactions when someone expresses surprise at my name are: either to point out that I’ve got three cousins with the same name, so there’s more of me where that came from; or to exclaim that they loved me so much that they named me twice. Just like New York, New York.

In Sodom, we know from the Torah,
the sinful did dwell, and Gomorrah.
When guests came to visit,
they’d leer: “How exquisite!
What to do to them? Oh! Let’s ask Quora!”

1. Lurk in a topic for a little while. Go through the list of most viewed writers, and check whether they look like they know what they are talking about.
2. When you A2A, go to the View More menu, then go to the relevant topic, and pick not the first people that come up, but the names you recognise as knowing what they talk about, and failing that, the names with the most answers in the topic.
3. You can’t find a relevant topic? Then for pity’s sake, go back and tag the right topics on the question. That’s actually step 0.

English: Bee Em Double You.

Australian English: Beamer.

Greek: well, Greek only referenced English as its default foreign language in the last generation. So it’s the German pronunciation: Beh Em Veh. (Μπε εμ βε)

Cypriot Greek: from memory, Pemve (Πεμβέ) —/b/ is rendered in Cypriot Greek as /p/, since Cypriot Greek has a three way contrast of /ᵐb p pʰ/.

Apparere gradus maximus [est].

As always with these questions: no tattoo until you get a second opinion.