What would a map of Quora look like?

Vote #1 User: User’s answer to What would a map of Quora look like?.

Vote #1, #2, and #3 in fact. BUT DON’T SOCKPUPPET TO DO IT!

Ahem.

This is my own poor attempt.

There are two “self-contained” national communities on Quora: the US Quora, and the Indian Quora, which the departed Laura Hale memorably once called “The Other Quora”. The non–self-contained Quora national communities are, of course, the Other Other Quora.

The rest, I trust, are self-explanatory.

What makes you wish you understood Russian?

Odd you’d ask me, Habib le toubib! Russian actually is a language I wish I understood.

  • There’s a little bit of Byzantine literature published in Russia, and it’d be useful to access the literature.
  • There’s a bit more Russian writing on Balkan linguistics: ditto.
  • Much more so: Mariupolitan Greek, spoken in the Ukraine, is substantially documented in Russian (and to a lesser extent Ukrainian); I’m at a disadvantage going through the older sources on it.
  • Maxim Kisilier, Neohellenist in St Petersburg and Quora user, mostly publishes his stuff in Russian, as do his students and his colleagues. (Maxim, is Fatima Eloeva still there?) And it’s very good stuff.
  • I knew several Russians in high school and uni, and I took a liking to some Russian literature and music. Baratinsky, Shostakovich, Mavakovsky. (Yes, that’s an eclectic list.) And the Russians, they are so духовные! (No, not David Duchovny; “spiritual”). I did in fact teach myself Russian for a few months in high school, which… is not a lot, but it’s better than nothing.
  • The main languages of Western Europe, I’ve got: I can access a lot of stuff that way, online, and it’s helped with tourism too. Because I don’t have much Slavonic (apart from those few months), Eastern Europe is a closed book to me. But Eastern Europe for me are cultural neighbours; it’d be nice if they weren’t a closed book.

What is the difference between egoism and egotism?

As I harrumphed in Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is the etymology of the word “egotism”?:

There is a recherché distinction that some people have made between egotism and egoism in English: egotism is a bad thing, egoism isn’t. But that distinction is pretty much made up, and noone really bothers with it any more.

What is Quora’s policy on copy-pasting one and the same Forer style text over and over in answer to completely different questions?

Quora has a policy on self-plagiarism, as part of its policy on plagiarism:

What is Quora’s policy on plagiarism and attribution?

Quora’s strong preference is for people to use Quora’s blockquote formatting. This plagiarism policy applies to people’s own answers on Quora and repeatedly posting the same answer on Quora without blockquotes and attribution is against policy on all answers after April 12, 2016.

Quora doesn’t have a specific policy about Barnum effect (i.e. statements that vacuously apply to anybody); Barnum statements by themselves are not against policy, and would merely fall into the morass of poor answers.

Self-plagiarism is enforced robotically on Quora, and is not uncontroversial: Is Quora’s policy regarding self-plagiarism reasonable?

Are there expressions related to cat knowledge other than “nine lives” and “επτά ψυχές” (seven souls)? What is the situation with other languages/people?

Vishal Mukherjee: Vishal Mukherjee’s answer to Where did the phrase “cats have nine lives” come from?

The myth that cats have multiple lives exists in many cultures around the world. It’s not always nine lives, though. Some Spanish-speaking regions believe cats have seven lives, while Turkish and Arabic legends claim cats have six lives.

The Decalogue of Nick #7: I play the mandolin badly and the violin worse

For Victoria Weaver.

Music came early to me. Soaking up the multiple musical traditions of Greece while living there, from 8–12.

(Or to be more precise, the musical traditions that Greek State TV allowed through. Crete was in by then, but no violins, only lyras, by an ahistorical metric of authenticity—I was living in violin country, and assuming the local fiddler was some sort of interloper. No Ionian islands: barbershop quartets, too Western. No brass: too suspect in their Balkanness.)

And then, when back in Australia, my mum got me a tape of best-of Bach organ music, as played by Helmut Walcha.

She walked past the racket as I was listening, puzzled, entranced. “My fault for buying it”, she winced. Yeah. Her fault indeed.

Music is my literature, music is certainly my art. Music lit was the high school course I got the most enduring learnings out of, scrutinising how those pieces ticked, putting them back together. Berg’s Violin Concerto; Bach’s Christmas Oratorio; Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.

Music is where I learned of tradition and innovation. Music is where I learned of the manipulation of tradition. (See second para.) It’s been a fond pastime, all too rare, for me to take the time to immerse myself in a new musical tradition, and work out how it varies, and how it hangs together. Ars Subtilior. Georgian folk. Country blues.

Hence the mandolin; I got turned on to country blues by a blues guitarist and mandolinist (docwhite)—which made me realise that the Piedmont style was my thing, even if the Delta style was all I’d ever heard. My wife got me a mandolin, and I banged away at it a bit; even improvised a few times. But I’m not at the age where I can practice or stick to things much any more. The mandolin gets taken out maybe once a year.

I took to mandolin, because it’s the same tuning as a violin; in fact, my wife got me a mandolin because that’s what I’d idly commented to her during the first show we saw of Doc White’s. And I had played violin. Primary school violin lessons; resumed in high school, though I never got to be all that good at it. I did at least get to play in orchestra once or twice. Useful experience, being part of a band.

I wrote some music in high school too, for what that was worth. I’d gotten the inspiration to. Not the technique to. Certainly not the perseverance to. Ironically, it was only after I finished a doctorate, that I got enough perseverance to finish anything at all. I had a spare year between my PhD and my monograph while stateside; Compositions are the result. No, they’re not that long. No, I didn’t have that much perseverance after all. Yes, I’m happy with them.

I thought I was over not becoming an academic…

… but this comment triggered me, I guess. I have written on this before as an answer.

Yasin Karahan:

Well, f**k…the thing is: Wouldn’t it suffice to excell at what one does? With all due modesty: I’m pretty f’ing good at what I do and my professor agrees. Might be a tough nut to crack, but…is it really more of a utopia? How’d all those professors end up where they are? Money and “Beziehungen”? It didn’t have anything to do with them being good at what they do?

https://www.quora.com/How-diffic…

Ach, Yasin. My heart breaks that you are halfway through a doctorate, and you’re only now working out about Vitamin B. (For non-Germanophones: Vitamin B = Beziehungen = Contacts.)

When I was doing my PhD, and had worked this out, and was bemoaning it to my relatives in Greece, they sadly nodded their heads. They were in Greece: they knew all about a shortage of positions meaning that contacts take priority over merit.

Let me give you an anecdote. I was out of the PhD 8 years, but still hanging around uni (as an IT guy now). I was mates with a current PhD; German, as it happens. We’d learned that a PhD student who’d just finished was already lined up for a postdoc at Berkeley.

—Who does she know?, I growled to him.

—Nick, I must object! said my German friend most Germanly. X is an excellent scholar!

—And so are you, German friend, and so am I. Who does she know?

X was an excellent scholar. She was also the favourite of the head of department, who was well connected. She got a lectureship back in Australia five years later. A couple of years after that, so did my German friend. Also an excellent scholar.

I work in IT. I was no worse a scholar. I was worse at having contacts, did not pick my supervisor strategically, and worked in an area that would never get me a job.

Yasin: Publish. Network. Work on fashionable areas. Rinse, repeat. And like Haidar Abboud said: Perseverance. (Which means have alternative sources of income in the meantime.)

And punch your Doktorvater in the face, next time you see him, for allowing you to think that merit alone is going to get you a uni job.

In which parts of Greece do people pronounce the word “και” as “che” instead of “ke”?

Lots. Your search term is tsitakismos, the Greek name for the affrication of palatal /k/ [c] to [tʃ, tɕ, ts], as exemplified by the pronunciation of /ke/ “and” as /tʃe/ instead of Standard Greek [ce].

Going through the Centre for the Greek Language’s writeup of Modern dialects, and looking for that tsitakismos keyword:

  • South-Eastern
    • Some islands in the Dodecanese
    • Chios
    • Cypriot (as [dʒe])
  • Northern Dialects
    • Lesbos, Skyros, Mykonos
  • Cappadocian (refugee, moribund)
  • Southern Italian Greek (not in Greece)
  • At least some parts of the Peloponnese
  • Tsakonian
  • Old Athenian (including Aegina, Kyme, Megara)
  • Cretan and the Cyclades

In fact, as I’ve already mentioned in another answer, somewhere, the better questions to ask is: Where does tsitakismos not happen? The answer appears to be the Greek mainland and the Ionian islands, some bits of the Peloponnese and Attica excepted.

Incidentally, Greek dialectologists seem to have only worked out in 1983 (Contossopoulos’ paper) that the real split between Greek dialects is the word for “what”: τι vs ίντα, separating Aegean Islands and Old Athenian from the Mainland. That split corresponds closely to the tsitakismos isοgloss. The three Northern dialect exceptions, for example, are islands.

EDIT: cc Dimitris Almyrantis Philip Newton I’ve just stumbled on this paper from last year by Pantelidis: http://ins.web.auth.gr/images/ME… , which fascinatingly suggests that there are old connections between Old Athenian and Peloponnesian, and concludes that Old Athenian used to be spoken in Eastern Central Greece, which now speaks Northern Greek or Arvanitika. He notes, pp. 307–8, that tsitakismos turns up in bits (bits) of both the Peloponnese and Central Greece, though there is just too little data to work out how old and extensive the phenomenon is.

equitable

Definition of EQUITABLE

  1. having or exhibiting equity : dealing fairly and equally with all concerned an equitable settlement of the dispute
  2. existing or valid in equity as distinguished from law: an equitable defense

Michael Masiello’s answer to What do you hate about Quora as of March 2017?

So here’s the deal. I’m not writing any more answers for this site. I’ll watch. Maybe you can ban me for that. If so, fine. Blow me. If not, fine. Blow me.

Meanwhile, maybe you could let someone smarter than your whole brain trust put together — his name was Aristotle, you should look him up — offer a cogent gloss on your application of your policies. I will write here again if and when this site becomes “equitable” rather than what (supposedly) passes for merely “just.” Otherwise, this is not worth my time any more.