Month: April 2017

By way of corroboration of Chandra Mohan’s answer to Is Sanskrit still spoken today?—

The villages mentioned by others in their replies are just show pieces. They do use some Sanskrit in communication, which was taught to them by some activists, but I was given to understand that their vocabulary may not be more than a couple of hundred words and they can’t use it except for their routine communications. It’s more like a trained parrot reciting some sentences.

—I have been copy-editing a paper on the Sanskrit spoken in the village of Jhiri. The researcher estimates that of the 600 villagers, 20 have conversational competence in Sanskrit; and (as you’d expect) there is clear syntactic influence on their Sanskrit from Hindi. The revival effort in Jhiri, as elsewhere, is through the work of Samskrita Bharati, although the village has stopped working with them.

Of course, 20 out of 600 is not the impression you get from googling Jhiri. There is a lot of romance to the notion of reviving Sanskrit.

A2A’d; and the answers already here are… old. Since the answers already here, we have also had the introduction of Quora Credentials, and we have had some pushing from Quora to populate them with reminders.

There’s a preponderance of opinion in answers to date that people don’t care about who’s writing the answer, just about the answer itself. It reflects the schism between people using Quora socially or as an expert forum (Reddit vs StackExchange): cf. Quora Compass by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency. Not caring about who wrote the answer is not a universally held belief, and it is held now less than it was in 2011, as Quora’s user base has broadened. Not caring about who wrote the answer is also not what Quora holds, as Quora has been pushing credentials more aggressively.

Why do people still not do it?

• It’s work, that they don’t see immediate payoff in.
• Lots of users resent credentialism.
• Quora’s onboarding is minimal to nonexistent. (I only discovered a month after the new credentials that you could set years of employment.)

Well there’s the simple reason, and there’s the historical justification for it.

The simple reason is: BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE RULES.

🙂

And if it were up to me, you’re not putting enough accents on Greek words. The blanket rule that all monosyllabic words are unstressed, whether they are function words or content words, does not correspond to how the language is actually spoken. And it was the kind of rule only a committee could come up with; it wasn’t the monotonic system that actual linguists like Kriaras had come up with.

Why?

Greek diacritics – Wikipedia

Ancient Greek had pitch accent, and did not write any of its accents down: it was tolerant of accentual ambiguity, whether in location or kind of accent. In fact, Ancient Greek was also not written with any spaces between words. Writing and reading were difficult, and not widely known skills.

When the pitch accents started shifting to stress accents, scholars started indicating the different kinds of accent and their location on words, so that Ancient poetry could be read properly. That gave rise to the polytonic accentual system (“many accents”), which was the only way to write Greek anywhere for the next two millennia.

Starting in the 19th century, there were spelling reform proposals to simplify the accentual system, which was recording pitch and breathing distinctions that had died out two millennia ago. There were occasionally atonic proposals (“no accents”), to do away with any indication of stress. But the majority of proposals were monotonic (“single accent”), and in 1982 that was the reform that prevailed, after being de facto in wide use for a decade.

Why monotonic and not atonic? Greeks will tell you that there are still words that differ according to where you place the accent; and that is true. But comic strips are written in all caps, and so are headlines; and Greeks have no problem reading them, with only very occasional use of accents as disambiguators (almost always Ή “or” vs Η “the”). You’ll also often see no accents used in texting.

The real reason is that completely removing accents was a step too far, for people who had been writing and read accents on every word all their lives.

To clarify what this question is likely talking about:

We know that there was a continuous Greek presence in Thrace up to Constantinople, the Pontus (Black Sea), and Cappadocia, after the arrival of the Ottomans.

We know that there was a substantial Greek population in Western Asia Minor in the 19th century, which is linguistically distinct from Thrace, the Pontus, and Cappadocia: the dialect spoken in places like Smyrna was closer to Crete and the Cyclades.

We know that there was movement of Greek populations within the Ottoman Empire; we know for example that Bithynia was resettled from Epirus in the 17th century, and we know that the Tsakonian colony near Erdek/Artaki cannot have been indigenous, and likely dates from the 18th century.

We know that to the Ottomans, Christian and Muslim, ethnicity was not particularly important; religion was. “Greek population” would have been understood by everyone at the time to mean “Christian Orthodox population”.

So at issue is: whether the Christian population in Western Asia Minor disappeared, or remained continuous: whether that population entirely represents resettlement from Greece, or whether a Christian population remained in place in Western Asia Minor in the 15th century.

This is a topic Dimitra Triantafyllidou and I have disagreed on, and unlike me, she has read the mainstream tract outlining the theory of discontinuity, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor, and found it unconvincing.

If the population was discontinuous, and that’s how I’m interpreting the question, the answer is assimilation. The Greeks of Western Asia Minor weren’t massacred, they were converted to Islam. That there was conversion is known to be true; the debate is really whether there were any Christians left in Western Asia Minor in 1500 or not.

Presumably Thrace and the Pontus held out because they were conquered later, once the Millet system was in place, so there was less social pressure for conversion; and Cappadocia presumably was relatively inaccessible.

stoma is Greek for mouth.

–stomia is stoma plus an abstract noun ending: “-mouth-ation”.

In medicine, a Stoma (medicine) is also a surgically made opening. So a colostomy is a surgical intervention creating an opening (a stoma, a “mouth”) in the colon: kōlo-stom-ia > colostomy, “colon-mouth-ation”. The Wikipedia article gives 16 other stoma operations.

The -o- is not part of any suffix: it’s how Greek connects words together in a compound.

Of course, Quora doesn’t have a publicly visible ticketing system, so we can’t tell if an appeal has been ignored, or not updated. The case OP refers to, where a collapsed answer has been edited, could be such a case. My own experience is that when I’ve edited the answer it was promptly uncollapsed, but that may well be luck.

The formal appeal avenues are in Quora’s answer to How do I appeal a Quora Moderation decision? I would suggest that if the collapsed answer Appeal link is no longer available, because you’ve actioned the request, but the answer is still collapsed, that you use the generic appeal avenue—go to the contact form, specify the URL of the page, and give the details that the answer has been edited to conform but is still collapsed. Give them a few days beforehand.

Yes. It’s just not exclusively a site about Knowledge. It’s a site about the stuff its various users want to know about. Some of them want to know about selfies.

Don’t complain that people are writing stuff you don’t like: they will keep doing so. Curate your own feed, to see less of what you don’t want. Upvote, downvote, mute, subscribe.

So. What UI feature has suddenly changed today?

Now… massively disrupting your colour scheme by introducing a brand new colour is very, very unlikely to be a bug.

But did the new colour *have* to look like… how shall I put this discretely…

… human liquid waste?

Quora loves using pale greys, and loves compromising the legibility of its text against pale greys. A paler shade of grey would have been much less likely to…

… how shall I put this indiscreetly…

… pee off your users. 🙂

Am astonished that the obvious answer hasn’t been uttered yet.

There was a longstanding practice in America of referring to white ethnic minorities as hyphenated Americans. (Something Teddy Roosevelt famously decried.) There were, and are, French–Americans, Italian–Americans, German–Americans, etc etc.

Blacks changed their description from racial terms to a hyphenated American term in the 1980s, to emphasise that their deviation as a minority from any American norm should not be treated any different from that of French–Americans: that they too were just another ethnic minority within America—but still an integral part of the national fabric. That they were an ethnic minority, not a “different race”, with all the exoticisation and 3/5 of a person baggage that entailed.

Black people in America are called African–American in order to assert that they are no different from French–Americans. The discrepancy in prevalence with the white hyphenated terms is one of timing: by the 1980s, those white ethnicities had largely assimilated, so their hyphenated terms weren’t as widely heard as they were in Teddy Roosevelt’s time. And the steep rise in the 1980s is unsurprising: it was a deliberate coinage at a particular time.

African Americans – Wikipedia

In the 1980s, the term African American was advanced on the model of, for example, German-American or Irish-American to give descendants of American slaves and other American blacks who lived through the slavery era a heritage and a cultural base. The term was popularized in black communities around the country via word of mouth and ultimately received mainstream use after Jesse Jackson publicly used the term in front of a national audience in 1988. Subsequently, major media outlets adopted its use.

[…]

Many African Americans have expressed a preference for the term African American because it was formed in the same way as the terms for the many other ethnic groups currently living in the nation. Some argued further that, because of the historical circumstances surrounding the capture, enslavement and systematic attempts to de-Africanize blacks in the United States under chattel slavery, most African Americans are unable to trace their ancestry to a specific African nation; hence, the entire continent serves as a geographic marker.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to How did countries get their English names?

Otherwise, the main source of country names for the “Old” World—Europe, North Africa, major countries of Asia—is Latin, and indirectly Greek, as the prestige languages of English learning for a very long time. Thence the –ia suffix, which actually goes through three iterations:

• –ia for more recent loans, straight out of Latin, and less familiar countries (Albania, Persia, India, Slovakia)
• –y for Middle English and Early Modern English (from French), many instances of which later went to –ia (Turkey, Hungary, Italy; Normandy, Picardy; Indies for India, Candy for Candia = Crete)
• –e or nothing for very old and familiar country names (France, Spain)

EDIT: from comments:

Albany – Wikipedia: … An archaic name for Scotland, derived from the Gaelic Alba

The –y tells you the name was used in the Renaissance, when country names were still modelled after French (Albanie; Indies; Araby). Albany was originally in English a name for Scotland. English has a lot of tolerance for ambiguity, so they would have also called Albania Albany if they were paying Shqipëria any attention in the Renaissance.