Month: March 2017

There’s not a lot to be had in the region of course. From the Greek perspective:

• Serbs are our “brothers in Orthodoxy”—but I don’t know if that actually amounts to a positive stereotype. I don’t think relations between Greeks and Serbs have actually been close enough to rise to the level of positive stereotype.
• Albanians may have been vilified at the start of the mass migration of the 90s, but latterly they have actually become the model minority. Nationalists still hate them, but more moderate Greeks, my impression is, admire them for their work ethic, and for their readiness to assimilate.
• This is of course because there are migrants further down the pecking order now. Like Bulgarians…

A fair bit of philosophy and logic (and theology, which they were bound up with) was done in the West, and was built on subsequently. The De dicto and de re distinction is Thomas Aquinas’ handiwork, for example.

European nationhood is mostly a Romantic era creation, but its raw materials came out of the Middle Ages. As others have alluded to, modern Western literature and art in some aspects was built on mediaeval foundations (though a lot of it was also reinvented in the Renaissance, based on classical foundations).

The Middle Ages kept a critical mass of the Classics around, although it is fair to say that they did not make as much use of the literature as they did of the philosophy (and history, at least in the East).

I’m a bit incredulous at the other reactions to this question; but of course, you’ve A2A’d the right person.

You’re right, OP. bind and band and bundle all mean similar things. A band is something that you bind things with. An bundle is a bunch of things that have been bound together. Hey, bound is the past tense of bind! And for that matter, there’s also bond, which is a binding agreement. And as it turns out, bend as well (Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/bandijaną), possibly because you bend a bow in order to bind it.

If you go to bind – Wiktionary, you’ll see that every one of those words derives from Proto-Indo-European/bʰendʰ-.

So if they’re all related, why do the vowels change?

Because Indo-European used ablaut to indicate various kinds of grammatical change. Ablaut involves vowel change in the stem, instead of using suffixes or prefixes to the stem. It is an old process, which is no longer productive; but you see it all over the place in several branches of Indo-European. You see it in the strong verbs of English: sing sang sung. You see it in the German stems underlying your three words: Proto-Germanic/bindaną, bandiz, bundą.

You’ll see it in Ancient Greek too. The related words temnō “I cut”, atomos “uncuttable”, at–mētos “uncut” are parallel to sing sang sung.

My translation (and you can tell):

Account: Traducteur de questions Quora

Question: How does the Quora Question Translator work?

Question Details: How are the questions to be translated chosen? What is the level of supervision over this bot by the site owners? What is its anticipated level of activity?

Réponse de Sihem Soibinet-Fekih à Comment fonctionne le Traducteur de questions Quora ? (Sihem Soibinet-Fekih, A2A by Jay Wacker)

We select questions internally according to a series of search filters. For example, we observe the popularity of questions asked on English Quora, and work out which could be successful or provoke interest among French-speaking users.

The questions are then submitted to a machine translation platform to be adapted into French. The translated questions may be revised if we decide that the adapted version can be improved.

Day by day, we improve French Quora to give you a version of the site most faithful to the English and Spanish versions, while bearing in mind that each audience is unique to each language, and that the site should be subject to its own cultural specifics.

Vote #1 Jay Wacker: Jay Wacker’s answer to What exactly is Wikidata and what is its relationship to Quora topics and questions?

To break down what Jay said just a bit further:

An ontology is an organisation of concepts in the world. Quora’s existing hierarchy of topics is one, contributed to by Quora askers, Quora topic gnomes, and whatever the initial seeding of it was within Quora.

Wikidata’s ontology is a rather bigger ontology. It has been contributed to by Wikipedia editors, in all the various language versions, and many other online projects.

In addition to the benefits Jay has mentioned: the Wikidata ontology has more information about its topics than the Quora one does. In particular, it has more explicit links between subtopics and their parent topics; more identification of topics as people; more identifications of topics as places, and the geographical coordinates of those places. (As well as all the information contained within the related Wikipedia articles; and the infoboxes in Wikipedia are all machine-readable by design.)

By matching Quora topics to Wikidata topics, Quora can work out parent/child topic links, which are pretty crucial to how topics are used. (You have to explicitly tell Quora that sociolinguistics is a subtopic of linguistics, and if you don’t, people subscribing to linguistics will not receive new sociolinguistics questions. Multiply that by every new topic ever.) Quora can produce maps of location topics, and work out which places are close to each other, which can also help the related topic suggester. Quora can narrow down which topics are (famous?) people. Quora can work out which topics are bona fide ambiguous, where it hasn’t already.

Questions and answers rely on a topic ontology. Quora is now upgrading from a smallish homebrew ontology, to a much bigger and authoritative homebrew ontology.

Well, not as spectacular a story as some. Just answers.

7 days:

5k is on the low end, so maybe less traffic than usual. I have been busy with freelance work this past couple of weeks, so I have been writing somewhat less than my usual deluge of stuff. Spike yesterday is from the inexplicably popular Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some cultural faux pas in Australia?

30 days:

That’s more like it: it varies between 5k and 10k these days. Some spikes, but actually no one overwhelming answer.

3 months:

The gaps at the start are of course the days the stats died (The Statistics Black Hole by Nick Nicholas on The Memes of Production). The peaks are my most viral answer to date, and not an answer I take any warm fuzzies in: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which Indian states are well known in other countries?

• The world has moved on since 1970 (C: Kernighan and Ritchie). But the world still needs a low level language.
• Pretty printing and statement termination are solved problems. The programmer does not need to be forced to deal with them.
• You can have a low level language and still have associative arrays, extensible arrays and garbage collection as primitives.
• The world needs strict typing. But we can hide that from the programer pretty well.
• Encapsulation is a good thing, but you can skip inheritance and most of the other object oriented stuff.
• It’s about time parallelism was enshrined as a programming primitive.

Use of swearing to affirm solidarity. There’s a lot of that. In fact, what the contextual cues are to differentiate between swearing used to affirm solidarity, and swearing used to express hostility. Cultural factors associated with the use of swearing to affirm solidarity: what are the demographics? Working class? Youth? Gender? Other correlates? Are particular kinds of swear word used more for solidarity, or more for hostility?

This question has been asked and answered recently by someone else, but: Quora is agnostic about a banned user’s questions (or answers for that matter). Even if a user is banned for troll content, it is not assumed that all their answers are trollish, and those answers need to be reported, to be evaluated for collapse or deletion, separately.

That goes even more for questions, which once written belong to the community (to be reworded at will).

Yes it’s more work. I’d rather that work than the alternative over indiscriminately removing anything ever asked by a user, and making all the answers anyone has ever given inaccessible.

Well, OP, at least you’re not calling them Monophysites. 🙂

The Greek Wikipedia, and as far as I can tell the Greek Orthodox Church, refers to Oriental Orthodoxy as Pre-Chalcedonian Orthodoxy (Προχαλκηδόνιες Εκκλησίες – Βικιπαίδεια). Of course, a church who thought Chalcedon got it wrong is not going to call itself that.

Orthodoxy – Wikipedia points out the following:

The Homoousian doctrine, which defined Jesus as both God and man with the hypostatic union of the 451 Council of Chalcedon, won out in the Church and was referred to as orthodoxy in most Christian contexts, since this was the viewpoint of the majority. (The minority nontrinitarian Christians object to this terminology).

…

Following the 1054 Great Schism, both the Western and Eastern Churches continued to consider themselves uniquely orthodox and catholic. Over time, the Western Church gradually identified with the “Catholic” label, and people of Western Europe gradually associated the “Orthodox” label with the Eastern Church (in some languages the “Catholic” label is not necessarily identified with the Western Church). This was in note of the fact that both Catholic and Orthodox were in use as ecclesiastical adjectives as early as the 2nd and 4th centuries respectively.

Note also the title of the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria:

Pope and Lord Archbishop of the Great City of Alexandria and Patriarch of All Africa on the Holy Orthodox and Apostolic Throne of Saint Mark the Evangelist and Holy Apostle that is, in Egypt, Pentapolis, Libya, Nubia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and all Africa.

Orthodox also shows up in the title of Ignatius Aphrem II of Antioch; in Syriac it’s presumably calqued:

English: His Holiness Moran Mor Ignatius Aphrem II, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East and Supreme Head of the Universal Syriac Orthodox Church

Syriac: Qaddišuṯeh ḏ-Moran Mor[y] Iḡnaṭius Afrem Trayono Paṭriarḵo ḏ-Anṭiuḵia waḏ-Kuloh Maḏĕnḥo w-Rišo Gawonoyo ḏ-ʿItto Suryoyto Triṣaṯ Šuḇḥo ḇ-Kuloh Tiḇel

Arabic: Qadāsa Mār ʾIġnāṭīūs ʾAfrām al-Ṯānī Baṭriyark li-ʾAnṭākya wa-Sāʾir al-Mašriq wa-Raʾīs ʾAʿlā lil-Kanīsa al-Suryāniyya al-ʾUrṯūḏaksiyya fī al-ʿĀlam

What this tells me is:

• Orthodox was the name Christians who felt they were not heretics called themselves from the 4th century.
• The Chalcedonian churches called themselves Orthodox. The Miaphysite churches, I’m assuming, would have retorted that they were Orthodox. If the Syriac for Orthodox is a calque, that certainly tells me that Syriac Miaphysites were well aware of the term, and happy to use it for themselves.
• To go by the title of the Coptic Pope and the Syriac Patriarch, they certainly regard their see as Orthodox, and likely have done so for a very long time.
• After the Great Schism, Western Christianity moved away from the term Orthodox, and went with Catholic instead. There was no move away from the term Orthodox in the Miaphysite churches; and Roman Catholic activity in the Middle East would have discouraged them from retaining Catholic.