First and so far only eponymous BNBR. Story told in three parts:
(My only anonymous BNBR, I *think*, was for a similar reason.)
Habib, so many good answers here with allusion to the US Constitution, and I couldn’t hope to exceed them or even reach them.
And then, I remembered a different country’s constitution. Not even its current version.
In the 60s, Greek leftist youth protested the assassination of Grigoris Lambrakis and the subsequent upheaval in the country, by chanting “114!”
Article 114, the final article of the 1952 Constitution of Greece. It’s article 120 in the 2008 revision of the current Constitution of Greece.
H τήρηση του Συντάγματος επαφίεται στον πατριωτισμό των Eλλήνων, που δικαιούνται και υποχρεούνται να αντιστέκονται με κάθε μέσο εναντίον οποιουδήποτε επιχειρεί να το καταλύσει με τη βία.
Upholding the Constitution is a responsibility entrusted to the patriotism of the Greek people, who are entitled and obligated to resist by any means necessary whoever attempts to do away with it by force.
Mutatis mutandis, Habib le toubib? You could do worse than this as a closer.
Like Turkish (and just as mumbly as Turkish), with what sound like added uvulars. Which make it sound slightly Arabic.
I have seen another such question about Central Asian Turkic, where an answer commented that it sounded Korean. I can see why: the combination of high back vowels and rapid syllables.
To me, it sounds like a less mumbly Turkish, and certainly much more like Turkish than, for example, Azeri sounds to me. Having read the other answers, there are moments where I hear something reminiscent of Russian palatalisation, but they are very infrequent.
That’s of course proves that I shouldn’t be reading the other answers before answering questions like this.
As Joe Devney said, depends on the study, but I have a fair guess.
That would be gender, presumably, as in grammatical gender, in those languages that have them. The wording would then presumably be something more like how does assignment of entities to particular genders vary from one dialect to another within the same language.
Dialects are linguistics’ natural laboratory: you have a common starting point for the dialects that’s quite well understood, even by laypeople—they can work out how the dialects relate to each other and to the common core of the language without much trouble. So the variation in how different dialects treat the same phenomenon can be mapped out straightforwardly. Because the dialects have diverged recently enough, those changes can usually be made sense of easily, compared to changes between different languages.
So the variation in gender assignment within a language, between different dialects, will have a common starting point—in Modern Greek dialect, say, Ancient Greek; and you can make sense of the variation between dialects, because there’s much less variation to trace than, say, the variation between French and Russian.
The purposes of such a research study would be the same as the purposes for any research study on how entities are assigned to gender; the results would just be much more tractable.
Blogs not already mentioned that I’m subscribed to:
It certainly is not regarded by most language teachers as important. Latin and Greek prose composition, which required students to produce original text (even if as a pastiche of Thucydides or Caesar) was huge a century ago, and I get the impression is extinct now. There are some ancient Greek text books that trying to teach the language like any modern language, immersively and with students conversing in the language before reading it. But they are in the minority.
Is the contemporary avoidance of production correct? My hunch is, you have a slightly better understanding of the nuances underlying syntactic or lexical choices in passages, if you yourself have had to go through them in language production.
But it is only a slight advantage, and most people learning classical languages now probably don’t need that level of nuanced understanding anyway. After all, they can always read one of the many translations around if that’s what they’re really after.
At minimum, other users on Quora, per the letter of the policy.
Quora’s answer to What is Quora’s “Be Nice, Be Respectful” policy?
Increasingly, it appears from Moderation decisions, also public figures who are not already users on Quora:
Habib Fanny: BNBR against public figures not on Quora by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency
See in particular the comments to that report.
See also Quora Moderation — Election Season PSA by Marc Bodnick on The Quora Moderation Blog—which first announced that not being nice and respectful to political candidates was unacceptable. The rationale for this being that abusive criticism of political leaders makes Quora an unwelcoming space for those leaders’ supporters.
They’re all Ancient Greek, really, and they’re all Greek star names from Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are all the Greek star names?
I love my folks, however problematic things have been between us, and I don’t begrudge them their struggles in a strange land, to do the best they could for their kids. (Maybe their objectivity, but not their struggle.)
But what was it like to be raised by immigrant parents?
Defensive.
Don’t assimilate to those drunkards. Remember your heritage. Stick to your own. We have morals. We have tradition. All they care about is horse races and booze anyway. Of course you’re going to make something yourself. No you’re not going to be a musician. No, you can’t date, you must attend to your studies. [The fact that I felt I needed to get permission!] Surely you’re going to want to go back to the mother country one day. What do you mean, “you could never function in a country without a civil service that works like clockwork”?!
Not a negative overall; I like that it’s given me a detachment from both the majority and the minority cultures, it’s a useful thing. But there’s a lot of sex I missed out on as a result…