Month: May 2017

Recall the old, old answer by the then head of Reddit: Yishan Wong’s answer to Why are my questions not answered on Quora?

The fact that it’s a Q&A format is just a hook to make it easier for people to start writing.

Quora is a great place to write answers and to read answers, but it is not a good place to get your own questions answered.

It is true that disregarding the intent of a questioner is, under normal circumstances, assholery. Yes, so are troll questions; but troll questions are not a get-out-of-jail card for this rather idiosyncratic attitude. The attitude is best motivated by this:

Anil Mitra’s answer to Questions on Quora don’t “belong” to the person who asked them, but shouldn’t it matter that the original asker gets a satisfactory answer?

If a sincere questioner wants Quorans to respond to their intent, they should state their intent directly. This does not always happen. But if, in stating their intent directly, they limit the scope of their question they are limiting the usefulness of the site.

The premise of Quora is not answering questions, it’s treating questions as springboards for formulating knowledge. Questions people actually need narrow and usable answers to, with a time limit no less, are not the kinds of question that will get much joy here. They’re not what Quora is looking for, and they haven’t cultivated the kind of community that would answer in those terms.

But still. That’s no excuse for not trying to work out what the OP’s intent was in good faith, and dismissing their intent; Quora policy in fact dictates this. Phrases such as “this is obviously a troll question” are in fact reportable under BNBR. (How widely is that known?)

The satisfaction of the person matters; if they follow up and say, “what I was actually after was…”, I will engage with them. But the way Quora is set up, it’s not mandatory; I have in fact sometimes said that I would ignore the specifics of a question’s details to give a more general answer.

Great answer from Roman Huczok: see Roman Huczok’s answer.

Getting an undeciphered text with no Rosetta stone is, as Roman said, hard work, though not impossible. The question is after the peculiarities of Lojban which would make the decipherment harder—particularly given the whole exoticism that Lojban claims to, of encoding predicate logic as something quite alien to human language.

I’ll retort that the way actual humans use it, the predicate logic component is not that big a deal: you can still clearly see human verbs behind it. (The way Lojban predicates avoid raising by default is somewhat more odd.)

I’ll suggest the following as things that would trip up a would-be decipherer:

• The compounding morphology of Lojban—which is both its derivational morphology and its compounding proper—is eccentric: lots of three-letter reduced forms, which only occasionally remind you of their original five-letter predicates. The decipherer will easily tell that they are a distinct word class because of their phonotactics, but working out that they are compounds will take longer.
• The terminators—the spoken bracketing of Lojban—are not a human language thing, and the conditions of ambiguity which make them optional aren’t human either. A decipherer might work out that they coocurr with certain syntactic structures, but would be likelier to construe them as attitudinals (modal particles).
• Because of Lojban’s stick-them-in-a-blender approach to the core predicates, the tools of historical linguistics or inspection will be pretty useless in deciphering them. In fact, apart from le, la, lo, na, mi, I don’t think inspection would yield up anything.
• The use of numbered predicate places instead of prepositions—the tritransitive and quadritransitive predicates, the strategies for rearranging arguments, the relative paucity of actual prepositions—would throw a decipherer as well.

As others have mentioned, kath– is a variant of kata as a prepositional prefix to verbs and verbal nouns. The meaning of kata– as a preposition in compounds is captured in Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges:

Down from above (καταπίπτειν fall down), back (καταλείπειν leave behind), against, adversely (καταγιγνώσκειν condemn, decide against, καταφρονεῖν despise), completely (καταπετροῦν stone to death, κατεσθίειν eat up), often with an intensive force that cannot be translated. An intransitive verb when compounded with κατά may become transitive.

There’s not much to read, apart from the Greeks’ accounts. The peoples to the north were not literate; the Carthaginians did not do history, and their accounts would have been wiped anyway. The main other source of external accounts I could think of would be Persians; and nothing from the Sassanids survives, though some Persian accounts were based on their accounts. (Roman–Persian Wars – Wikipedia)

Ah, a Modern Greek perspective in the question details.

I answered the corresponding Ancient Greek question at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why has the word συγγεής two γ? I know it comes from σύν + γεν, and that later the ν disappeared, but why putting two γ? And why has the ν disappeared at the certain point in history?

Tl;dr:

• The velar nasal /ŋ/ is not identical to the alveolar/dental nasal /n/. It is, if you like, a cross between a /ɡ/ and an /n/.
• English, Latin, and many other languages have chosen to write it as an <n> before a <g>.
• Ancient Greek instead chose to write it as a <g> before a a velar: <gk, gch, gg>.
• Which is not absurd, given that the sound is a cross between a /ɡ/ and an /n/.
• Ancient Greek had geminated voiceless stops; /kk/, /pp/, /tt/. It did not have geminated voiced stops; any words with /dd/ or /bb/ are not native Greek words. So there was never any risk of orthographical <gg> being interpreted as [ɡɡ] instead of [ŋɡ].
• Modern Greek uses Ancient Greek historical orthography, so it was not going to respell the sound if it survived unchanged from antiquity. It still spells it as a <g> in front of a velar.
• So yes, it would indeed be strange to write Angelopoulos as <Angelopoulos>, Ανγελόπουλος. Standard Greek Orthography never has (though I think Soviet Greek orthography, which was phonetic, did).

In addition:

• Modern Greek pronounces <gk> and <gg> (historical [ŋk], [ŋɡ]) identically as [ŋɡ]. Just as it universally pronounces <nt> as [nd] and <mp> as [mb].
• Many Modern Greek dialects, and increasingly Standard Modern Greek, pronounce <gk>, <gg> (historical [ŋk], [ŋɡ]) as just [ɡ], dropping the initial nasal—just as they have done with orthographical <nt>, <mp>. So the usual pronunciation of the name Angelopoulos is actually [aɟelopulos] anyway (palatalised g). One more reason why it would not occur to anyone to write it with an <n>.

Ich habe zehn davon.

(I got ten.)

EDIT:

Jetzt bleiben sieben.

(Now there’s seven left.)

There has been some excellent speculation here on what guides the business decision by Quora on what languages to target:

• Nick Nicholas’ answer to What other languages should Quora support?
• Josephine Stefani’s answer to What other languages should Quora support?
• Clarissa Lohr: Why German and Italian? by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency

In fact at that point in time (last month), the question What other languages should Quora support? overlapped with this. (Let’s keep it separate though.)

D’Angelo has said publicly that he’s not going after the Mainland Chinese market, which is hard for American companies to break into. (Even if Zhihu wasn’t already established, China would create it just so Quora wouldn’t get a foothold.) Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora are not going to be enough to sustain Quora in Chinese.

The factors in play are:

• cultural bias of VCs funding this (me)
• market niche opportunity (me, Josephine Stefani)
• googlability opportunity (Clarissa Lohr)—external searchers via Google being more critical for profitability than registered users

The factors are I believe of increasing importance from top to bottom.

• Cultural bias: Eurocentric, Islamophobic, and maybe still dismissive of Orkut: next up is Russian, maybe Portuguese.
• Market niche opportunity: Bigger markets: Arabic, Portuguese or Russian. (TheQuestion in Russian may be too well entrenched a competitor already.) Regional niches: Malay/Indonesian, Persian, Swahili. (Hindi not enough of a competitive niche, given the widespread use of English.)
• Googlability: Clarissa identified that anyone who is likely to register on Quora already knows English well; but lots of people google in German, including those not confident in English. I’m not sure which market the Googles pick up most, but I suspect it’s Russian and Arabic.
• EDIT: Correct that, per Josephine’s https://insurgency.quora.com/Cla… . Russian, Japanese.

My guess from all the above: unless they’re spooked by TheQuestion, and their VCs still hold a grudge against Orkut, Eurocentrism will again prevail, bolstered by the googlability argument: Russian and Portuguese.

I’ll start by giving the passage on this change from Elementary Middle English grammar : James Wright, as a change specific to French loans.

§231. Initial e– disappeared before s + tenuis as Spaine, spȳen, staat beside estaat, stüdien, scāpen beside escāpen, squirel (O.Fr. escurel). Initial vowels also often disappeared before other consonants, as menden beside amenden, prentȳs beside aprentȳs, pistīl beside epistīl. Initial prefixes often disappeared, as steinen beside desteinen ‘to stain’, sport beside disport, saumple beside ensaumple.

Now, as OP points out, Latin > French and Latin > Italian went the other way.

The insertion of an initial e- before a cluster makes a word easier to pronounce; Latin statūs > Old French estat (Modern état) > English estate (state). Lots of languages do this; Turkish is another good example; French station > Turkish istasyon.

So why would English go the other way?

Notice that this change happened to French loans; it isn’t something that happened generically in the language, to Old English words. And ease of pronunciation is not an absolute in a language; after all, plenty of languages do have words starting with st-. Like Latin.

Or Old English.

If a change systematically happens to French words, it might not be motivated by making them easier to pronounce. It might be motivated by making them look more familiar—which can mean making them better aligned to the native phonotactics of the language.

So: did Old English have lots of words starting with an unaccented esc-, esp-, est-? From what I’m seeing at An Anglo-Saxon dictionary : based on the manuscript collections of the late Joseph Bosworth , no: just a couple of words starting with accented est-. As opposed to lots and lots of words starting with sc-, sp-, st-. And of course native stress was on the first syllable: an unstressed initial esc-, esp-, est– would have sounded doubly alien to Old English.

The rule was not regular and overwhelming: we’ve gone back to escape from scape, and we’ve kept apprentice. But—without knowing this for a fact—I think that’s what’s happened.

tis eudaimōn? ho to men sōma hygiēs, tēn de psychēn euporos, tēn de physin eupaideutos.

Word for word:

Who good-daemoned? The: the on-the-one-hand body healthy, the on-the-other-hand soul good-resourced, the on-the-other-hand nature good-educated.

Hokay. Let’s dance.

1. Yes, my first name really is the same as my surname. Just like my three firstborn cousins.
2. I did not speak to my parents until I was 2. While I was being wheeled in by the nurse to see the doctor about it, I was reading out the room numbers to her.
3. I learned English from Sesame Street. Which has left me with a lifelong aspiration to to be Oscar the Grouch.

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EDIT: The non-truth is #1; congratulations to Dorian Shkëmbi, Abigail (Abbey) Beach, and most especially Delaney Natale, who has clearly been paying attention:

I’m guessing 1, because I think I read somewhere that your first name is “Nick” and not “Nicholas”, which would technically make them different.

Yes, it’s a technicality. Sorry not sorry. But the birth certificate does say “Nick Nicholas” and not “Nicholas Nicholas” (thank the Gods), and I’m going with that.

#2 and #3 are related, and both are true. My parents were giving me mixed linguistic input, English and Greek—which is not a problem with language acquisition as such, it just means that kids take a few months longer as they disentangle the input. Because of it, I had acquired English just fine, but I wasn’t speaking to my parents who were giving me the confusing input.

I was however fluent in American, from Sesame Street (which child-minded me while my parents worked in the fish & chip shop downstairs); and when I’d worked out the nurses were not giving confusing linguistic input, I felt free to make like Count von Count, and count the room numbers. When my parents came in, I said mama, and that was the first word they heard from me.

Oh, btw:

In the early 1970s, following a counting session, the Count would laugh maniacally, “AH AH AH AH AH!”, accompanied by thunder and lightning flashes. He wouldn’t let anything interrupt his counting, and used hypnotic powers to temporarily stun people with a wave of his hands. This practice, however, was discontinued in the mid-1970s because of concern that young viewers would become frightened. In the mid-1970s, the Count became friendlier, did not have hypnotic powers, and interacted more with the characters (both live actors and Muppets). His laugh also changed from maniacal laughter to a more triumphant, stereotypical Dracula-style laugh.

He’ll always be maniacal laughter and thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening me, as far as I’m concerned.

And yet, I put down the Grouch as my role model. I know. It was a close run!

I couldn’t find the Oscar the Grouch and Yitzhak Perlman duet, so I’ll have to settle for this:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=e8xlA33q9EI