Month: March 2017

https://www.quora.com/careers/wr…

Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge, and internationalization is a critical part in achieving this mission. We recently launched Quora en Español, and we’re eager to make Quora available in more languages soon. Quora is looking for a Writer Relations Manager to activate and manage the writer community on Quora auf Deutsch.

As part of the marketing team and cross-functional internationalization team, you will play a dynamic role in helping early adopters, active contributors, and influential figures find success on Quora auf Deutsch from the beta period, launch, and beyond. You’re a native German speaker, curious, driven, and excited to make a significant impact in helping achieve the company’s mission. This is a full-time position based in Quora’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, with some travel required.

Responsibilities:

• Help attract, encourage, build, and manage Quora’s writer community in German-speaking markets
• Be an active member of the Quora auf Deutsch community
• Evangelize Quora’s policies and take responsibility for major moderation decisions affecting active writers
• Develop and execute marketing strategies targeted towards recruiting valuable to Quora
• Pursue growth-related partnerships and opportunities for Quora
• Work closely with Product and Engineering teams to better understand Quora auf Deutsch users

Requirements:

• Passion for being part of an active writing community
• Experience growing and managing online communities
• Mastery of German language; ability to write prolifically with proper grammar
• Fluency in English
• Deep understanding of German culture and internet industry trends
• Proven ability to work independently with enthusiasm, energy, and drive
• Experience working with technical teams at product-centric companies
• Thoughtful usage of Quora and passion for our mission

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

A queer little word, querent, and one that tripped me up when I beheld it come from the Magister:

Michael Masiello’s answer to Why do many students believe that their major will limit or prevent them from getting jobs or degrees in other fields?

Sure, there are other means of finding this out, but Quora is a Q&A site, and these querents probably hope to hear from people who have made the transitions they’re curious about.

Others have used the word on Quora before; Adrián Lamo has a particular fondness for it. But if you search for the word in questions, you’ll notice a common theme:

• How do I communicate bad results to a querent as an astrologer?
• In Lenormand tarot, what does it mean if the querent appears in the last column with no future ahead?

I fancied myself as recognising the word, I know my Latin: querent < quaerens, one who asks. Yes. But there’s more that I’d missed:

Definition of QUERENT

inquirer; specifically : one who consults an astrologer

Querent – Wikipedia:

Querent became used to denote “a person who questions an oracle” because it is usually when one has a problem that requires otherworldly advice that one would seek out the oracle in the first place. This oracle may simply be a divinatory technique, such as the I Ching, that is manipulated by the querents themselves without recourse to any other human agency. Alternatively it may involve another person, someone perhaps seen as a “fortune teller” – particularly a practitioner of tarot reading or other form of mediumship – from whom advice is sought.

Now, The Magister is no common Quoran using a fancy word because it looks fancy. The Magister is, well, The Magister.

By calling people who ask questions querents, he is implying that they seek professional advice from Quora, looking upon it as an oracle. Or tarot reader. Or astrologer. Or Magic 8-Ball.

They did. The French Revolution inspired a lot of Greek intellectuals in the two decades before the Greek Revolutionary War, laying down the theory for what a Greek state should look like. In his Memoirs, General Yannis Makriyannis mentions the great warriors who have inspired him to deeds of valour; his list includes George Vasikhton.

I do not need one, but I do want to give some away! It advances my goal of increasing the readership of Dispatches from the Other Language Quoras, for one.

PM or comment to get one.

EDIT: No more invitations available!

In the 19th and early 20th century, there were several phonetic alphabets and spelling reform proposals in circulation; Romic alphabet was one instance. Linguists working on different languages had their own transliteration conventions in place, for use not only in citing non-Roman languages, but also for dialectal transcription.

The International Phonetic Association was initially founded to promote Romic; but in 1888 it devised a single, language-neutral phonetic alphabet, the International Phonetic Alphabet, to serve as an international standard. So its historical significance was in overriding the disparity of spelling reform proposals, language-specific transcriptions, and multiple phonetic alphabets, with one international standard, which has gained ground continuously since. Think of it as the metric system for phonetics.

And just like the metric system, there is one country that holds out against it:

Americanist phonetic notation

On the one hand, as the Wikipedia article points out, that’s slightly unfair: the Americanist notation is a systematisation of the various pre-IPA, diacritics-based transliterations, and it is still used plenty in reputable contexts: it’s fine to transliterate Russian <ч> as <č> if you’re doing transliteration instead of phonetics. Like citing a name or something.

Historical linguistics also holds out against the IPA, and uses traditional transliterations instead. So a Sanskrit retroflex n is going to be written as <ṇ>, and not /ɳ/. The Gothic Hwair is going to be transliterated as <ƕ>, and not <ʍ>.

If on the other hand you are using the Americanist notation in a discussion of synchronic phonetics—well, as far as I’m concerned you should be bastinado’d.

But I think that of the imperial system as well.

They’re minor things, but they’re things I keep slipping up on:

• Sometimes Golang hides the difference between a type and the pointer to the type. That doesn’t mean the asterisk is decorative. Most of the time, Golang doesn’t hide the difference, and you do need to put that asterisk in.
• It is idiomatic to assign foo, err := x multiple times in a row. Golang will let you repeat err as the second assigned variable. But it won’t let you repeat it as the first element: that’s always meant to be a new variable.
• If there’s any fluidity in your programming at all, the libraries you import will always lag behind the libraries you use.
• Strings are not byte arrays.

Compared to the smoking ruination that accompanies beginner’s errors in C, these are on the benign side, especially as they are often caught by the editor.

For Greek science and mathematics, e.g. Ptolemy and Galen, several texts survive only in Arabic translation.

The West was exposed to Greek philosophy and science via Arabic in the 1200s; the West only gained substantial access to the Greek originals in the Renaissance.

The Arabs did not, from memory, take substantial interest in Greek literature.

As a general answer, rather than an answer as to your specifics, OP:

If a user has blocked you, they have chosen to stop all communication with you. That includes apologies. It is possible in theory for the blockee to reach out to the blocker; but it is extremely risky, and frowned upon, and “let it go” is good default advice:

• There are several instances documented here where the blockee meets the blocker at Quora meetup, and they’re having a mellow chat, during which the blockee asks “So, why’d you block me anyway?” And the blocker responds, “Oh, I did?” Sometimes, the blocker then even remembers to unblock the blockee.
• I have heard of instances where the blockee reaches out to the blocker via a mutual friend. You’d have to have a mutual friend, of course, who agrees to put themselves in the path of fire.
• There’s this approach: Do you think I deserved to get blocked for this comment to Habib Fanny’s fear of being killed on the basis of racial prejudice in USA? Now, this approach did work: the blockee expressed themselves unclearly, Habib assumed he was being attacked, and Habib accepted the blockee’s explanation and unblocked him. Note however:
• The question has since been deleted.
• The OP was universally derided in answers to the question that weren’t from Habib, and many of the reactions were decidedly un-BNBR. (The OP earned himself a block from one of the respondents in fact, just for raising the question.)
• Habib Fanny is a mensch. Most Quora users are not mensches.

My own prejudice is that someone who’s trigger happy about blocking is not someone I’d want anything to do with anyway. But then, I don’t often give people excuses to block me. (Not never, but not often.)

Nope.

Australians enjoy a good reputation in the parts of the world I have been to (Europe, North America), and I have not been to the parts of the world where they might not (India, Papua New Guinea?). I have been to New Zealand, but any animus there is jocular and reciprocated. The Austria/Australia confusion did not generate any disgruntlement I could detect while in Vienna or Salzburg.

I didn’t broadcast that I was Greek while in Istanbul, but I found that it would not have made a difference: the Thaw has happened. (I still did not feel comfortable volunteering that my father is Greek Cypriot.)

There are more countries in the world where it would make sense to hide that you’re Greek than that you’re Australian, but I haven’t been there either (countries immediately north of Greece).

The Albanian lëkurë means ‘skin, bark’. The German Leder means ‘leather’.

Consulting Vladimir Orel’s Albanian Etymological Dictionary:

lëkurë ‘skin, bark’ < *lauk-urā

lakur ‘naked’ < *lauk-ura

In both cases, *lauk– is derived from Indo-European *leuk̂- ‘to shine, to be white’.

German Leder, English leather < Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/leþrą < Proto-Indo-European *létrom ‘leather’. From The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, it appears *létrom is a word specific to Celtic and Germanic.

So, doesn’t look like it.