Originally Answered:

Why did Quora cancel the Most Viewed Writer topics section in profile? Will there be a new highlights instead of MVW?

Change to Most Viewed Writer by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates

Yes, English routinely transliterates Cyrillic Ё as E. For that matter, Russian routinely writes Ё as Е. Our transliterations (and your default orthography) aren’t up to date with the last couple of centuries of sound change in Russian.

Potemkin is the most familiar version to English-speakers, since “Potemkin village” is a well known expression (and one they tend to have seen only in print). If they are somewhat educated, but do not speak Russian, they will actually be confused by Potyomkin.

So I’d go with the established, conventional Potemkin rather than the phonetically accurate Potyomkin, myself. But that’s not the modern trend in English; the modern trend is for phonetics over convention (e.g. Beijing not Peking). Not Moskva yet, though.

There are no rules, but there are trends.

• -ish is used for country names that the English would have been familiar with in the Middle Ages.
• -ese is used for country names that the English learned of via the Italians or Spanish. That includes East Asia.
• -(i)an is used as a default for new-fangled country names, or names which look like they are Latin. That includes all country names ending in -y and -ia.
• -i is used for Arabic-speaking countries; it is an Arabic suffix.

I have recorded a couple of passages I have read out in Esperanto, but why not a new one.

Klingono, from Neciklopedio, the Esperanto version of Uncyclopedia.

Vocaroo | Voice message

Well, that was fun!

My Esperanto has a mercilessly Greek accent, with no variation in vowel length or quality. In theory, that is optimal Esperanto; in practice, people wince at the rat-tat-tat of it. I think that excerpt I just read out (which was in fact somewhat amusing) made me tone down the rat-tat-tat, if anything.

I have a velar /n/ allophone too. I mean, doesn’t everyone? I think Zamenhof explicitly permitted it somewhere.

Rat-tat-tat.

See Romain Bouchard’s answer to Could the names for the rivers Potomac, Thames, have any etymological connection with Greek potamos (=river)?

Hm.

Well, it’s messy.

PRO:

• A bio (sorry: credential) is understood as a separate component of meaning. That is normally taken as equivalent to a separate sentence, and hence should start with a capital.

CON:

• The bio (sorry: credential) is displayed inline with your name in answers. In fact, it is currently separated by a comma, which means that in that context it is not treated as a separate sentence.

PRO:

• Credentials are displayed in menus. The usual practice for options in menus is for each option to be understood as a separate component of meaning—which, again, means capitalisation as a sentence.

CON:

• They aren’t real sentences, displayed in the context of continuous prose. For that reason, people aren’t going to be fussed about capitalisation, and the default behaviour when in doubt is to go for the least marked behaviour. Uncapitalised is the least marked behaviour.

PRO:

• I don’t want my bio to look like it’s been txted by someone who ignores the shift key. ;-P
• Sorry. Credential.

Placebo effect, people.

A lot of this plays out in people’s heads. Not just the redhead-chasers’ heads, but the redheads’ too.

If you live in a culture in which redheads are told they are better in bed, a non-trivial number of redheads are going to believe that they really are better in bed, and act accordingly.

A culture in which redheads are told they are better in bed can, of course, serve for others as added pressure, or as a resented stereotype. But there doesn’t need to be a genetic factor in place, for a cultural perception to become realised in practice.

Of course, you can also say the same about any number of other physical attributes, that get stereotypically associated with being better in bed. It all plays out in the mind. And we aren’t as immune to those kinds of mind games as we like to think.

A2A, and I don’t speak Cypriot.

Well, this is quite the puzzle.

The lyric goes:

Τ’ άι Φιλίππου δκιάβηκε, τζι ήρτεν τ’ άι Μηνά,
τζι οι κορασιές παντρεύκουνται τζι αλλάσσουν τα λεγνά

St Philip’s day is gone, St Menna’s day is here,
and girls get married, and the slender ones change/and change the slender ones.

I’ve been through several Cypriot dictionaries, and the only definition they give for λεγνός (Standard Greek λιγνός) is “slender, slight”.

Lots of people on YouTube are confused by the term, but the consensus there is that it refers to slender girls, with a hypocoristic (“cutesy”) neuter. Λυγερή “my slender one” is a mainstay of Greek folk song.

So, the slender maidens change? Because they get married?

There’s a song lyric Larkos Larkou – Composer – Musician – Cyprus, which also refers to changed slenders:

Θεέ μου τζαι να πέθανα το Σάββατον το βράδυ
Τζαι Τζερκατζήν που το πρωί να κατεβώ στον Άδη
Πον’ οι παπάδες αδειανοί τζαι τα λεγνά αλλαμένα
Να συναχτούν να κλάψουσιν ξηχωριστά για μένα.

God, would that I died Saturday night,
and descended to the Netherworld Sunday morning
when the priests are empty (at leisure ?!) and the slenders are changed
so they can gather and cry especially for me.

Sunday is when priests are not at leisure, but I guess they are available for funerals, they’re at church anyway. But it would make sense that the male singer would like young girls to cry over his funeral. And on a Sunday, the girls have changed into their Sunday best. So I think that’s what the original lyric means:

“and girls get married, and slender maidens [used here as synonym for girls] change [into their Sunday best, for St Menna’s Day]”

Not as recondite as some of the Magister’s lexical choices, but I just saw it today, and I see that he’s used it against me once:

Michael Masiello’s answer to Can someone be intelligent and not agree with your political views?

she [Irene Colthurst] is a fierce intellectual who writes trenchant, lucid, well-argued answers supported by strong historical evidence and governed by powerful critical analysis of available data

Michael Masiello’s answer to Why would Trump not make a good president?

Here’s a trenchant piece on the evolution of ignorance from pose to reality in the past fifty years of GOP history.

Michael Masiello’s answer to If you were to make a musical of the lives of the Church Fathers, who would be your hero(es) and villain(s), and why?

A2A. Glad you asked, Nick, this trenchant question, upon my answer to which so much depends.

trenchant

Definition of TRENCHANT

1. keen, sharp
2. vigorously effective and articulate <a trenchant analysis>; also : caustic <trenchant remarks>
1. sharply perceptive : penetrating <a trenchant view of current conditions>
2. clear-cut, distinct <the trenchant divisions between right and wrong — Edith Wharton>

As so often happens, the power of the word is in its history:

The word trenchant comes from the Anglo-French verb trencher, meaning “to cut,” and may ultimately derive from the Vulgar Latin trinicare, meaning “to cut in three.” Hence, a trenchant sword is one with a keen edge; a trenchant remark is one that cuts deep; and a trenchant observation is one that cuts to the heart of the matter.

Cuts like a knife. And, just like someone with a knife: you don’t mess with them.

Like my question about a musical about the lives of the Church Fathers. What obscurantist banter made me A2A the Magister that one?

To elaborate on Achilleas’ answer (Vote #1: Achilleas Vortselas’ answer to Which version of the Bible does Greek Orthodoxy use?), the 1904 Patriarchal edition was a new collation based on Athonian Byzantine-type manuscripts. It is not identical to Erasmus’ Textus Receptus:

Byzantine Vs. Alexandrian: What is the correct text-type?

The translation of the New Testament included in the EOB is based on the official Greek text published by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1904 (Patriarchal Text or PT). During the Turkish occupation of the Greek lands, various editions of the NT had been published with significant variants. In 1902, in order to ensure ecclesiastical harmony, the Ecumenical Patriarchate appointed a committee whose task was to publish a common and official text. This committee retired to Mount Athos and studied about 20 major Byzantine manuscripts from which they adopted one, yet taking into consideration significant variants from other manuscripts. This text, which is very close to the so-called Majority Text (MT), was published for the first time in 1904. It has been since then adopted by all Greek-speaking Orthodox Churches (Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Greece, Cyprus, and Crete). Its purpose is not to offer an always speculative reconstruction of the original autographs but to provide a uniform ecclesiastical text which is a reliable and accurate witness to the truth of the Christian faith… The majority of all (Greek) manuscripts available today belong to the Byzantine type. They are all very close to the Textus Receptus which underlies the KJV/NKJV, to the Majority Text which is reconstructed based on the majority of manuscripts, and to the Patriarchal Text. The Patriarchal Text of 1904 is indeed extremely close to modern editions of the Majority Text, such as the Hodges & Farstad of 1982 and Pierpont & Robinson of 1991.”