Month: March 2017

Esperanto neurotically tried to avoid lexical ambiguity, but didn’t get there for compounding, and between that and soundalikes, it’s doing ok. Raymond Schwartz was the main punmaster of the language.

Examples: the sundry aĝo “age” compounds in La Diversaj Aĝoj de l’ Homo, or the groanworthy “tumble dry” of Molière in El “Verdkata Testamento” (1926); Ero (lava rulo; The Miser is L’avarulo).

Lojban really is designed to avoid lexical ambiguity, including at compounding, and I don’t remember much play there, if any.

Klingon has a fair bit of polysemy, and that has been used for jokes. I’ve mentioned here, I think, my spontaneous pun when I walked into my first Klingon meetup, and a guy I’d managed to antagonise said SaH ’Iv? (“Who cares?”) Quick as a pistol, I responded jISaH jIH, naDev jIHmo’: “*I*’m present, because I’m here.” (The verb is ambiguous.)

Polysemy also explains a joke by Okrand, which at first glance seems to be an anti-joke:

Doq’a’ SuvwI’pu’? ghobe’! SuD! “Are warriors red? No! They are blue!”

The chuckle by Michael Dorn on the recording was… unnerving.

But SuD doesn’t just mean blue. (Or green. Or, in violation of how human colour works, yellow.) SuD also means “to take a risk”…

Native speaker, which makes these all the odder:

• women as… well, women instead of wimmin.
• pronounciation. Analogy ftw.

Hate to bring the serious to the answer, but I’m with Jiim Klein:

1. Pidgins are called that because of their origins, rather than their grammar, although they do tend to be remarkably similar.
2. “Foreigner talk”, the way people dumb down language when talking to non-fluent speakers, are informally called pidgins, and indeed foreigner talk is a major origin of actual pidgins.
3. Language games are typically not called pidgins.
4. The recurring features of pidgins are things like dropping grammatical markers, using unmarked inflections, very simple syntactic structures.

Now, I’m not up on my memes, coz I’m old.

• Lolcat is a mix of foreigner talk, baby talk (which has overgeneralised inflections rather than unmarked inflections), and all-out whimsy; I find it hard to believe that any real pidgin would use the I of I can haz cheezeburger?, let alone the are of I are crying cuz I are out of focuss.
• Doge (meme) has a syntactic frame much too restricted to be a pidgin (many mis-subcategorisation, much exclamatory, such ludic), and a far more subtle sense of modifiers than any pidgin would bother with.
• I don’t know Doggo. If Doggo is not Doge, and is exemplified in How did the doggo language start? • r/OutOfTheLoop: doggo does a bork and u r doing me a frighten—then again, too much play on normal English syntax, and too much play with wrong inflections and derivations to be pidgin-like: a pidgin would just cut it down to Yu mekim mi frait.

You point out the use of gerunds for tense in Doggo as a pidgin: a pidgin is not going to know what a gerund is, because pidgins drop all the grammar they can. Tense in pidgins are separate words; the classic English-based pidgins use words like by-and-by (future), finish (perfective), been (past).

I mean, if people stuck on a plantation with no common language but what the masters barked at them spontaneously started speaking in Doggo, then yeah, Doggo would be a pidgin. But what I’m finding doesn’t look like a pidgin. What I’m finding is comically inverted English, rather than radically stripped down English.

The most authoritative analysis of what markets Quora could most usefully move into is by Josephine Stefani: Josephine Stefani’s answer to What other languages should Quora support?

The upshot is, I’m guessing Quora picked German and Italian because it is probably easier to actually set up shop in these markets. But if it really wishes to adhere to its well-worn slogan of ‘sharing and growing the world’s knowledge’, I think it should have a look at other parts of the world that really need it: Arabic, Russian (maybe), Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian …

My own answer identified Arabic and Russian too, but Josephine did an awesome job of it.

It will not in itself make me leave Quora.

But it adds to the things that make me think badly of Quora—along with the UX Russian Roulette, the Black Maria of moderation removing people in the middle of the night and the headscratchingly inexplicable decisions, the lack of a clear mission, yadda yadda yadda.

I will leave Quora, as I’ve answered before, when it stops being fun—or to be more precise, when it is unfun substantially more often than it is fun. Outage is frustrating; if I’m halfway through a response on a comment, intensely frustrating, as was the case a couple of days ago. So long as its impact is less than weekly, I’ll put up with it. But these things can have a drip drip drip, cumulative effect.

I don’t keep track of them. 🙂

I solicit PMs from people, to let me know who’s been banned or blocked.

Or deactivated. In fact, deactivations really do require me to keep track of people, because I try not to report deactivations immediately—usually people come back on Quora shortly afterwards. I fail to keep track of deactivations, and I ask people to get back to me if the user is still deactivated after a couple of days. (Hence me giving lots of people a fright, by reporting User’s deactivation as early as I did.)

More to the point, I’m amazed how the people who regularly report bans and blocks keep track of them. I add in reports when I notice them, but I don’t notice them nearly as often as my regular reporters do.

I also subscribe to the Quora Account Suspension and Bans topic, so I will get news of some “Why was X banned?” questions before they are deleted. But PMs are far and away the main source of information.

Interesting. I’ve been in a series of jobs and/or avocations where it is very hard to know, because there haven’t been straightforward quantitative metrics. A lot of what I’ve been doing has been government sponsored culture change (promoting IT interoperability), and that is slow.

• Writing policy papers: well, I dunno, I write the papers, the papers get drafted and redrafted, the papers go out. The board and the stakeholders say OK, but policy is normally a marathon; change is incremental, and there’s always another government department and another vendor to try to get on board.
• Writing IT standards: if you don’t get many requests to update the model, you may have done your job right in anticipating the requirements. Or then again, you may not have promoted the standard to the people that would stretch it into new domains. Getting a request for update is also a success, it means they’re paying attention.
• Promoting IT standards: less pilot projects. Thank god. The concept, it is proven, we don’t need to prove it any more. At least not with those clients.
• Writing software. The client tells you that it does what they want. I’m starting to get that freelancing. It’s hard to get in pilot infrastructure programming (e.g. messaging systems), because it’s pilot, and it’s infrastructure (not visible), though we’ve got ourselves a good instant-validation niche. It was hard to get in an unmentionable past job where the boss kept me completely barricaded off from all users, so I made up my own metrics. And was pretty happy with them.
• Scholarly papers. If you get feedback, at least they’re paying attention. If you get recognised in conferences, you just hope it’s because it was a good bunch of papers, and not because you were a fun drinking buddy last conference.
• Lecturing. Anonymous quantitative student evaluations can kiss my hairy arse: I filled those in as a student, and I remember giving the lecturer a 4 out of 5 so they wouldn’t get too uppity. What mattered to me as a lecturer was the qualitatives. One student saying “never allow Dr Nicholas to take a course again”, and three or four saying I was the best lecturer they had in their undergraduate career. University administration had no time for someone polarising like me. And screw them too.

  The kids that said that? They got it. And by that, and by polarising them, I knew I was doing something right.

Read about the sonnet: Sonnet – Wikipedia

Read lots of sonnets.

Get comfortable with writing in metre. Start with blank verse.

Get a rhyming dictionary.

Pick a sonnet scheme. The sonnet scheme determines the structure of the argument you’re going to be making in the sonnet.

• In the Italian sonnet (the Petrarchan), the octet (first eight lines) make one argument, and the sestet (the last six lines) makes a new argument: there’s a volta, a twist, a turn, at the start of the sestet. The rhyme binds the octet tightly together, and the sestet tightly together. The octet breaks naturally into two quatrains, and the sestet into two tercets. So there’s a finely poised thesis/antithesis, and a contrast in rhyming structure between the two.
• In the English sonnet (the Shakespearean), you have three quatrains, each with their own rhyme, and a final couplet; so there is less of a sense of the quatrains being bound together. (In the Spenserian sonnet, the quatrain rhymes are related.) Before Shakespeare the volta was still at the start of the third quatrain (same place as in the Petrarchan). In Shakespeare the volta is in the final couplet, as a badoom-tish. Each quatrain advances the argument, and the couplet is either a summary, or a Woah Didn’t See That Coming!

Why yes. You’re making an argument. That’s a critical thing about the sonnet, whether in Italian or English form. It’s not a spontaneous outpouring of inspiration: it’s art. The scheme corresponds to an ordered presentation of a thesis and antithesis. Maybe with a synthesis in the final couplet or the sestet.

I haven’t kept track assiduously, but out of 2k answers, it’d be half a dozen. Either deserved, or not really worth fighting.

For me, the words are very meaningful, and I do care if a person is feminine or masculine.

But then, noone would confuse me with anyone who’s answered the opposite.

I am also very much aware of the contingency and cultural specificity of femininity and masculinity as constructs. I am aware that there are plenty of people who have difficulty or malaise aligning to them. I am aware that they can lead to toxic consequences unchecked, and that there is a consensus in flux about how they are negotiated and defined and externalised and internalised.

Vote #1 Victoria Weaver of course: Victoria Weaver’s answer to For you, what are femininity and masculinity? I’m talking about the sociological sense here.

Are they real? As real as fashion sense or race or music. They’re all in the head. That doesn’t mean they’re not real. That doesn’t mean they can’t be a source of good in the world—they’re constructs that it is up to us to harness. And they don’t disappear in a puff of smoke, just because we’ve identified their downsides.

To talk of the psychological sense: I’m not going to apologise for finding femininity attractive, or for feeling good about certain aspects of masculinity. I have a socially conditioned sexuality, and having a sexuality is a good thing. In itself, having a straight sexuality doesn’t make me (to pull out some representative examples) biphobic, transphobic, squicked by agender or bigender people, or whatever else. For me; others will see it differently, I expect.

I do not believe that having a sexuality, informed by constructs of masculinity and femininity, automatically makes you a pig; I also have a superego, after all. And the norms that inform that superego, and that determine the sociological nature of gender constructs, are being remoulded and renegotiated. As well they should.