Month: March 2017

OP, you know about the first translation of the New Testament into Modern Greek by Maximus of Gallipoli, in 1638! That is awesome!

And it would be awesome if that was the version that the channel used in the video:

But no. The text is Neophytos Vamvas’ translation, and you can read along here:

N. Vamvas (Bambas) Old and New Testament

You did some great detective work: of course it’s Byzantine Text Type, it’s an Orthodox translation.

The language does look a bit old fashioned, doesn’t it? Not just Koine old fashioned, and not straying very far from the syntax of the original: Τας εντολάς εξεύρεις “you know the commandments”. It sounds not just katharevousa, but positively 18th century.

And indeed: his New Testament translation dates from 1833, with the Old Testament following in 1850.

Here’s the Wikipedia article about the translation: Η Αγία Γραφή, Τα Ιερά Κείμενα Μεταφρασθέντα εκ των Θείων Αρχετύπων – Βικιπαίδεια. And here’s a speech about him from the Archbishop of Athens: Ο Αρχιεπίσκοπος κ. Ιερώνυμος μιλά για τον Νεόφυτο Βάμβα.

The Church of Greece seems to be friendlier towards him now than it would have been at the time: he (or his collaborators) translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew and not from the Septuagint, and knowing he’d get no support from the Orthodox Church, he’d cooperated with the protestant British and Foreign Bible Society, which the Orthodox Church loathed. (In fact his translation is the preferred translation of the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches of Greece, and had also initially been the translation used by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.) This Orthodox blog post attacks it as a translation from the King James Bible: Λάθη στή μετάφραση τοῦ Βάμβα. Χρήστος Σαλταούρας.

Vamvas got the idea for the translation in Paris, working with Adamantios Korais, started the translation as a teacher in Corfu, completed it as a teacher in Syros, and then got a job as a philosophy lecturer in the new University of Athens, where he ended up as Dean of Arts.

The Vamvas translation was the only modern translation until the 1960s that didn’t provoke street riots (unlike the demotic translation of the New Testament by Pallis in 1902); and given that it is not a Demotic translation, I suspect it is the favourite of the Orthodox church now, even if they distanced themselves from it beforehand.

While I roll my eyes at The Mission Statement, Quora has stated two rationales for its walled garden which guarantee that the Internet Archive will stay on their spider block list:

• Authors retain copyright for their contributions, and Quora only retains a non-exclusive license to publish. The terms & conditions do not authorise blanket republication elsewhere without the author’s permission, and Quora would consider spidering to be republication. It’s why Quora is so restrictive on author’s self-archiving: you can only archive your own posts, and you can’t include others’ comments.
• Quora wants people to be able to unperson themselves from Quora—to delete their accounts and contributions to Quora, without them being retrievable elsewhere.

Laura Hancock and Vicky Prest, especially when Laura changed her profile pic to what basically looks identical to Vicky’s profile pic at small resolution.

I said *small* resolution.

In fact, I saw a selfie on a post by Vicky once, and was about to comment “hey, I thought you never posted pictures of yourself”—only to realise oops, Laura.

And I think it’s more the profile pics than anything else. I mean yes, they have some similarities: both cool, both non-het, both sex positive, both “outspoken”; but really, not *that* similar.

OK:

ἀγάπα σεαυτόν agápa seautón. That’s the imperative. Konstantinos Konstantinides’ ἀγαπᾶν σεαυτόν agapân seautón is the infinitive “to love yourself”. The quote from St Matthew in Evangelos Lolos uses the future indicative agapēseis: “you shall love your neighbour like yourself.”

Chad Turner went with the middle voice imperative of philéō: φιλέου “be loved [by thyself]”. The verb is fine—Greek philosophers used philéō more than agapáō, and I think agapáō became more popular in Koine. But the cultural resonance of the New Testament use of agapáō is pretty strong; and while the middle voice as a reflexive is intelligible, the unambiguous reflexive seauton is a lot clearer. (If you want to use this verb in the imperative, it’s φίλει σεαυτόν phílei seautón.)

OK, let’s dispense with hora quickly. Not to belabour it, but yes, coincidence.

Probabilities add up pretty quickly in real life, in a way that clashes with our seeking of patterns: See Birthday problem – Wikipedia. If you put 23 randoms in the same room, there is a 50% probability that two of them will share the same birthday.

The probability is so high, because the coincidence is not that, say, Amy and Nick both have the same birthday on August 29. It’s that any two people out of the 23 will have the same birthday on any of the 365 days of the year. That’s a lot of possible coincidences.

Two random bisyllabic words in two languages, sounding kinda similar and meaning kinda the same thing? It’s guaranteed. Coincidences do happen.

The Bulgarian word for “come!” being elate, and identical to Greek ελάτε? That’s a lot more plausible as a loanword.

The most random spread of Greek, I’d say, is meli in Hawaiian: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some (longer) words that appear or are considered false cognates, but which could plausibly be actual cognates?

What’s the furthest spread of Ancient Greek in lexis? It’s a great question, and I don’t think I’ll do it justice.

• Via Christianity, there’s a smattering of Greek words in most languages with a tradition of Christianity. Bishop and church barely look like episkopos and kyriake [oikia].
• Via Latin and Modern scholarship, there’s more than a smattering of Greek words in probably more languages by now.

Neither of those are what you’re after though.

• There are some Greek words in Hebrew, such as sanhedrin < synedrion, Epikoros < Epicurus.
• Then there’s um… *googles*… *finds hit in Google Books*… *hey, I own that book!* A History of Ancient Greek (I own it in the Greek original).

This leviathan of a book has 110 pages on language contact between Greek and: Semitic, Thracian, Illyrian, Phrygian, Carian, Lycian, Lydian, Iranic, Etruscan, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Celtic, Indic, Arabic. (The contact could be either way.)

They’re all neighbours of Greek, and the furthest reach is Indic. Let me pick the far reaches I find interesting:

• Iranic: Middle Persian dēnar, Modern dīnar < δηνάριος. Middle Persian drahm, Modern dirham < δραχμή. Middle & Modern Persian almās < ἀδάμας ‘diamond’. Middle Persian asēm, Modern sīm < ἄσημος ‘silver’. Sogdian nwm < νόμος ‘law’. Khotan Saka lakāna < λακάνη ‘basin’. Pashto mēčan, Ormuri mučin < μηχανή ‘grindstone’.
• Gaulish: possibly calques, e.g. goddess name Rocloisia ‘listener’ < ἐπήκοος, tooutios < πολίτης ‘citizen?’
• Old Indic stratega < στρατηγός ‘general’, meriakha < μεριδιάρχης ‘battalion commander’, anakaya < ἀναγκαῖος ‘honorary title, initially relative of ruler’; these military terms lasted for just a couple of centuries, and never made it into Sanskrit. Sanskrit did borrow some trade terms: khalīna < χαλινός ‘bridle’, paristoma < περίστρωμα ‘bedcover’, kastīra < κασσίτερος ‘tin’, melā < μέλαν ‘ink’.
• Sabeshan Iyer adds: kēndra < κέντρον ‘centre’, suranga < σύριγξ ‘tunnel/underground passage’
• Arabic: any pre-Islamic loans are via Aramaic or Persian; e.g. dirham. In the Koran, the only loans direct from Greek are fulk < ἐφόλκιον ‘ship’ and possibly iblīs < διάβολος ‘devil’. Another 15 words are via Aramaic or Pahlavi; e.g. zawǧ < ζεῦγος ‘pair’, qamīṣ < καμίσιον ‘shirt’, burūǧ < πύργος ‘tower’.

Go to Uri Granta’s answer to Why can’t I use some basic emotional marks and emoji on Quora?

Open Suggest Edits.

Discover that emojis, and Plane 1 characters, ARE INDEED SUPPORTED BY QUORA, via its unicode macro. [math]unicode{x1F60E} unicode{x1F631} [/math]

And if you do start using emojis, don’t be surprised if people start reporting you for bad formatting.

Quora did not have any staff on the ground in a Spanish-speaking country, as of the launch of Quora en Español:

Quora in Spanish, which for the moment will be managed entirely from its headquarters in Mountain View in order to create a homogeneous product. (Some thoughts on the launch of Quora in Spanish – Enrique Dans)

In their interviews at around the time of the launch, D’Angelo and VP of Engineering Xavier Amatriain emphasised the importance of machine learning in many aspects of Quora, including moderation:

A glance at the English version suggests they are on the right track: in addition to an impressive moderating system that allows good answers to surface in the early stages and gain a high level of visibility, the company uses machine learning to carry out tasks such as moderation, spam detection or choosing the recommended questions for each user. In fact, the reason why Xavier Amatriain was signed up was his experience in the development of the largely recognized algorithms for Netflix recommendations. (Some thoughts on the launch of Quora in Spanish – Enrique Dans)

As of 28 October 2016, users on Quora en Español had the impression that there are no native-speaking moderators: ¿Hay actualmente algún moderador en Quora que sea hablante nativo de español?. I discount Aurelio Germes’ answer, that the community is self-moderating so Quora staff receiving moderation requests should not be considered as moderators. Maria Sefidari’s guess in that answer is that while there are more or less a dozen moderators on Quora in English, there are only one or two for Quora en Español, given how recently it has come out of beta; but she anticipates that it will grow and will include native speakers.

There is only one staff member with the title “Writer Relations International at Quora”, as far as Google is concerned, and they are also mentioned in the press released about the launch of Quora en Español. While I do not know what the job description “Writer Relations” involves, moderation appears to be a subset of it.

EDIT: Sihem Soibinet-Fekih, French Writer Relations, is also based in Mountain View, but is a native speaker of French.

I was a late convert to fish; it grossed me out until adulthood, and even now I’m on the picky side. But I do have a holy trinity of fish faves:

• Sashimi in general, and salmon sashimi in particular. Raw delicate flavour goodness.

• Canned tuna with chilli oil. Particularly, Sirena Tuna with Chilli in Oil. Joy in a can.

• That Sephardic gift to British cuisine, fish and chips. Most fish are fine, but I find myself particularly partial to grilled Whiting. Salt, lemon, white fish flesh: lovely. Pity fried chips disagree with me now in my dotage…

As OP hinted, Greek is one. English is not one. The difference between the two is, I believe, instructive.

Greek planitarkhis πλανητάρχης means “planet ruler” (or “planet leader”); the Classicising form of it in English would be planetarch. The term was coined in Greek in the early 1990s, when the fall of the Soviet Union meant that the world transitioned from two superpowers to one. The term refers to the US President, as the most powerful man in the world under the new dispensation: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής. It is commonplace in journalistic Greek, which loves those kinds of figurative flourishes: the Greek press would rather use “The Planetarch” in headlines than “Obama” or “Trump” or “POTUS”.

Looking online, Google Books confirms it as a post-1991 word: the first instance cited is from 1993, in a fictional conversation with Bill Clinton in Takhydromos magazine (“You’re a Planetarch, I’m just an inhabitant of the planet.”) Recently, the term has also started to be used more loosely, to refer to world champions in sport (Olympiakos basketball team, Andy Murray, Lewis Hamilton).

Recent news reports, somewhat gleeful about a prospective diminution of American power, are eager to speculate that the mantle of planetarch is passing to Xi Jinping (Ο Σι Τζινπίνγκ θέλει να γίνει… πλανητάρχης)
or Vladimir Putin (Νέος πλανητάρχης ο Β.Πούτιν: Κυρίαρχος στη Σύνοδο των G20 – Eπεισόδιο Κίνας-ΗΠΑ και γελοιοποίηση του Μ.Ομπάμα (εικόνες-βίντεο) – Pentapostagma.gr). Of course, what that really means is that we’re moving back into a multipolar world where there is no single Planetarch; but Greek journalistic cliches are going to be slow to adjust.

Alexis Heraclides in 2001 (Hē Hellada kai ho “ex anatolōn kindynos”) identifies the expression as originating in Greek:

Οι ΗΠΑ γίνονται «ο Αμερικάνος», ο «ιμπεριαλιστής», ο «Πλανητάρχης» (το τελευταίο ίσως είναι μοναδική ελληνική πρωτοτυπία).

The USA is reduced [in popular parlance] to “The American”, “The Imperalist”, “The Planetarch” (the latter is perhaps a unique Greek original coinage).

I would be delighted to hear of any other language with a similar expression.

English, of course, does not have an expression like “Planet Leader” (outside of science fiction). What it did have, up until the fall of the Soviet Union, was Leader Of The Free World. That term acknowledged the duopoly of power before 1991, just as Planetarch acknowledges the temporary monopoly of power after 1991. English also has World Leader, which is again an explicitly multipolar term: there are always multiple World Leaders, not just the one.

As shown by both the Wikipedia definition and answers to the Quora question Why is the President of the United States of America sometimes referred to as the leader of the free world? Is this term still true today?, Americans are rather embarrassed by that old Cold World locution “Leader Of The Free World”.

It was heavily referenced in American foreign policy up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, and has since fallen out of use, in part due to its usage in rhetoric critical of American policy.

The Quora questions, written from an Anglosphere perspective, suggest that the world is already too multipolar for “Leader Of The Free World” to make sense, and the allies of the US too independent-minded. You can see why an American or a Brit would think so.

You can also see why a Greek, with their national discourse of being victimised by Great Powers, would be inclined not to think so: weak countries are hyperconscious of hegemony, in a way that hegemons aren’t. So where Americans see bickering French and Russian challenges and plucky Britain, Greeks have long been inclined to seeing one overriding hegemon bossing everyone around, even when that picture doesn’t quite ring true anymore. (And when it doesn’t, they pass on the mantle to Putin or Xi, rather than recognising that there is no mantle any more.)

So if other countries have a similar discourse of Planetarchs, they won’t be in the Anglosphere, and they likely won’t be close allies of the US—who would make a point of avoiding a discourse claiming that the US rules everyone. They’d be countries like Greece, which are either powerless or which like to think they’re powerless.

There are a few others, but they are mostly neighbours of Greek and Latin, or else motivated by them.

Letter case – Wikipedia

Writing systems using two separate cases are bicameral scripts. Languages that use the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Adlam, Varang Kshiti, Cherokee, and Osage scripts use letter cases in their written form as an aid to clarity. Other bicameral scripts, which are not used for any modern languages, are Old Hungarian, Glagolitic, and Deseret. The Georgian alphabet has several variants, and there were attempts to use them as different cases, but the modern written Georgian language does not distinguish case.

Now, of these, Cherokee, Osage, Deseret, Adlam, Varang Kshiti are recent scripts, that got the idea from Latin. That leaves us with:

• Cyrillic, whose lowercase is pretty half-hearted—they look just like the uppercase, and they’d have gotten the idea from Greek and/or Latin (Peter the Great) anyway.
• Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Glagolitic, which are also immediate neighbours of Greek.
• Georgian used to be cased, and now isn’t. The uppercase and lowercase look different. (Meaning, they look authentic, originating in cursive.) EDIT: I was wrong: Georgian scripts – Wikipedia . The introduction of case, by mixing two historical variants of the script, was a shortlived innovation in the 1950s; historically Georgian was never cased.
• Armenian lowercase also looks different.
• Not sure how much case was used in Glagolitic.
• Coptic is now cased, but my impression from Googling is that casing is rare; Bicameral scripts speaks of “limited modern use”, and any facsimiles I’ve seen of Coptic were unicameral.
• Old Hungarian: if you read the fine print in Old Hungarian alphabet, not really cased, just makes the first letter of proper names slightly bigger. And Old Hungarian would presumably have gotten the idea from Greek or Latin as well.

So all the scripts that have case are either modern, and got the idea from Latin, or were neighbours of Greek. They developed case either at the same time as Greek and Latin (9th century), or later on.

The explanation is that case was a meme that originated in Latin and Greek, at the same time—independently or not, who can tell; it originated as a space compression technique associated with the high cost of parchment; and it spread out geographically from Greek to its cultural neighbours. It didn’t spread any further than Armenian and Coptic. Arabic and Syriac would have been next, and I don’t think their letter shapes would have made sense with case. Amharic would have made more sense I guess, but I don’t know how much cultural contact there was between Coptic and Amharic, and I don’t think casing was that prevalent in Coptic anyway.