Month: May 2017

If you’re at all serious about learning Klingon, you need to be on the Klingon Language Institute site—if for no other reason, to access the list of words that have been added to the language since the publication of The Klingon Dictionary. The best way to get any practice at the language or feedback is to join the tlhIngan Hol Email Discussion Group.

You’ll still need to learn the grammar and vocabulary from The Klingon Dictionary, which is under copyright.

I was given the following information a month or so ago by someone who was formerly on both Spanish Quora and English Quora. My source is a native speaker of Spanish. I am not in a position to verify it myself, and am passing it along as one person’s perspective.

1. Quora Spanish effectively has zero moderation, with an employee operating in the wrong time zone [for Spain], little familiarity with the local language or cultures, and B2 level language skills.

There is no enforcement of Real Name, due to lack of cultural knowledge: no one from a Spanish speaking country has one name unless they are a football player. They appeared to think that all Spaniards had 1 first name and 1 last name.

2. Quora outsources their translation of community rules, with the translated materials being provided by people unfamiliar with the state of the local language product and its features. This leads to weirdness where key policies being described are for features that do not exist. The translations are also often problematic.

For example: they posted a recent answer on Spanish Quora about rules. The whole post? About blogs. Guess which site lacks blogs? Spanish Quora.

3. Quora does not have any lawyers investigating local regulatory issues, and appears to be setting itself up for problems both employment and content wise.

Quora can’t even enforce policy to make content legal in Spain. They have said nothing about the right to be forgotten.

People in Spain can go to jail for things they write on the Internet. So say you say something like, “Oh? 43 whores were killed by their husbands? 43 dead whores isn’t enough. More whores should die.” Write that publicly enough and you can get reported to the cops, and enough of that and you can get them on your doorstep arresting you. Condenado a dos años de prisión por denigrar a las mujeres en Twitter.

4. Quora has no one on the ground in Spain or France.

They kept having meetups in Madrid on like days when half the people left town.
Then they’d pick times like Wednesday night at 7PM with a week’s notice. You don’t do 7PM if you want people to show here. You do 9:00 PM, more realistically 9:30 PM. They also picked a place where the reviews for one place were, “Staff stole my stuff” and “My laptop was stolen by staff.”

5. Quora Spanish has a huge gender gap issue, which makes English Quora look great. Quora has not dedicated resources to this and alienated users best placed to assist in fixing this back when it was fixable.

The gender gap problem Quora has on English Quora is about 10 times worse on Spanish Quora. It is no more than 10%. I went 2 months without a single woman appearing in the digest. It also enables questions like these:

¿En qué errores cae el feminismo contemporáneo?

¿Por qué el feminismo moderno es tan irracional?

¿Por qué hay mujeres que no les puedes contar todo lo que sucede sin que lo tomen mal?

And they have an awful tendency to refer to women as men. Spanish is a gendered language. “Top Writers” is gender neutral in English. It is NOT in Spanish.

Quora does gender neutral, and hires American Spanish speakers who are not formally trained as translators. Or they hire shitty translators. In either case, same result in that they often have embarassing translation issues.
In at least one case, they pretty much decided that fuck it, masculine it is.
Picture writing to maletopwriters@quora.com if you had any questions about top writers. This might appear like little stuff with the gender thing, but it is highly noticable to native speakers, and especially female native speakers.

Humphry Smith’s answer is right, but let me spell it out a bit more.

We come up with stem suffixes in proto-Greek, to explain the diversity of case endings of classes of nouns—a diversity between dialects of Greek, as well as trying to make intuitive sense of where they came from. The nouns in your details, neuter teîch-os, masculine triē´r-ēs, proper name Themistokl-ēˆs, are all explained by proto-Greek stems ending in –es-.

Why do we do that? Because if you look at the cases other than the nominative, they’re pretty similar. We account for that by saying they’re actually underlyingly the same.

A few things to keep in mind whenever we’re reconstructing proto-Greek:

• First: Attic contracts vowels (mooshes them together); Epic Greek tends not to contract them, and proto-Greek is more obvious if we move back from Homer rather than Attic. So (interleaving the masculine noun triērēs where it’s different):

Attic:

teîch-os
triē´r-ēs
teích-ous
teích-ei
teích-ē
triē´r-eis
teich-ōˆn
teích-esi

Epic:

teîch-os
triē´r-ēs
teích-e-os
teích-e-ï
teích-e-a
triē´r-e-es
teich-é-ōn
teích-e-ssi

See that -e- in the Epic? You can’t see it as clearly in the Attic. That’s part of the reason why it’s an -es- noun.

Oh, and Themistocles? The uncontracted form is Themistoklé-ēs. The only difference between Themistoklé-ēs and triē´r-ēs is that Attic contracts the last two vowels.

• Second: Proto-Greek -s- between vowels is deleted. (In Latin, its equivalent turns into -r-.)

So our Epic paradigm now becomes:

teîch-os, triē´r-ēs
teích-es-os
teích-es-ï
teích-es-a
triē´r-es-es
teich-és-ōn
teích-es-ssi

And that’s where the -es- stem comes from.

The catch is that horrid nominative singular, teîch-os, triē´r-ēs.

• Third: When you’re reconstructing nominals, always leave the nominative singular till last. They tend to be… different.

The masculine nom. sg can be understood by compensatory lengthening. As you’ll know from other third declension nouns, the nom. sg. masc ending here should be -s. The stem is -es. So Proto-Greek nom. sg ‘trireme’ would have been triē´r-es-s. When the first s drops out, the vowel before it lengthens to compensate: triē´r-es-s > triē´r-ē-s.

That leaves the neuter singular -os. In fact, cracking open my copy of Sihler: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin §296, the nominative singular is as old as Proto-Indo-European: it’s –os all the way back.

Now, whenever you see o in Proto-Indo-European, you immediately think of the ablaut alternation of ø/e/o. Sihler notes (§297) that “Scholars have long maintained that the nom./acc. form -os, albeit of securely PIE date, is secondary; presumably the zero grade nom./acc. of the the type krewH̥2-s [Greek krea-s] is a relic of a more original state of affairs.” What he’s saying is that the -o-s looks suspicious, and it may be a ø/e/o alternation; the word for ‘meat’, which has nothing rather than e or o in front of the -s, was the original way of doing those neuters.

At a first stab (so to speak):

Plutarch • Life of Caesar

After this speech to Metellus, Caesar walked towards the door of the treasury, and when the keys were not to be found, he sent for smiths and ordered them to break in the door. Metellus once more opposed him, and was commended by some for so doing; but Caesar, raising his voice, threatened to kill him if he did not cease his troublesome interference. “And thou surely knowest, young man,” said he, “that it is more unpleasant for me to say this than to do it.”

ταῦτα πρὸς τὸν Μέτελλον εἰπών, ἐβάδιζε πρὸς τὰς θύρας τοῦ ταμιείου. μὴ φαινομένων δὲ τῶν κλειδῶν, χαλκεῖς μεταπεμψάμενος ἐκκόπτειν ἐκέλευεν. αὖθις δ’ ἐνισταμένου τοῦ Μετέλλου καί τινων ἐπαινούντων, διατεινάμενος ἠπείλησεν ἀποκτενεῖν αὐτόν, εἰ μὴ παύσαιτο παρενοχλῶν· „καὶ τοῦτ’“ ἔφη „μειράκιον οὐκ ἀγνοεῖς ὅτι μοι δυσκολώτερον ἦν εἰπεῖν ἢ πρᾶξαι“.

The Greek literally says: “and little boy, you are not unaware that it would be harder for me to say it than to do it.”

The quote is attributed to an “official at the Roman Treasury” (I could kill you faster than I could threaten to kill you.) Plutarch says: “When the tribune Metellus tried to prevent Caesar’s taking money from the reserve funds of the state, and cited certain laws, Caesar said that arms and laws had not the same season.” I guess that makes Metellus an official at the Roman Treasury.

Can I say? Apparently Carlin is a podcaster who tries to make historical figures sound sexy and badass, but I don’t think he’s improved on the original.

Bless your cotton socks, my confreres in Albania and Czechia!

As of this writing in 2017, I’m not planning a trip to Europe soon; gotta save up for a house move, gotta tow that barge, and given where we live and our predilections, our next holiday is likely to be Hawaii. I suspect there’ll be a visit to at least some of Europe two or three years down the road though…

I am somewhat surprised to have been A2A’d this by four people. That my politics should be of interest at all, though I haven’t expressed my politics here coherently, is likely more a token of their esteem than my interest.

I am somewhat mortified to have been A2A’d this by four people. Unlike the other answers here, I have not distilled my politics in the crucible of texts and reflection; I’ve inherited tribal politics, identified axioms, and drifted accordingly.

I am somewhat grateful to have been A2A’d this by four people. The Decalogue of Nick was stalled at #8, my politics. So I get to write that here.

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I come from a long line of Greek peasants, on both sides. The Left in the Grecosphere did not make social progressiveness its main rallying point (though that is there); the Right in the Grecosphere had no equivalent of the American Dream, to seduce the entrepreneurial poor. There are regions in the Grecosphere that are die-hard right-wing anyway; and they are not where my parents are from.

My father tried to be a union organiser as a nurse, before he was intimidated out of it by management. He kept a belief in social justice, but also a reticence which his boisterous brothers-in-law could not understand. The household was broadly socialist in Greece, though with a touch of cynicism that I was too young to identify.

1981 was a heady time to be a kid in Crete. Our apartment was across the road from the Socialist Party headquarters, blaring out Theodorakis and Loizos anthems: “This soil is theirs and ours”, “We’ll get the sun drunk”, “We took our lives the wrong way, and we changed our lives”.

There was hope, there was ferment, there was anticipation. “The People in Power!” “For the First Time, The Left [in government]!” And when the Socialists were voted in, honest to God, random people were lighting each others’ candles in the streets. Just like Easter. The People had been reborn.

And then there was clientelism and corruption and disillusionment, but I was not around for that. I came back eight years later, shocked to see Andreas a laughing stock, and much of the country bought up by a con-man.

A chubby blunt-spoken first time MP was around for it though, and was surprised when he discovered that his voters expected the same favours and preferential treatment as did the supporters of the party they’d just ousted. Greeks have never forgiven that MP, for proclaiming his conclusion three decades later, “We embezzled that money together”—that the People were complicit in corruption. (So much more blunt in Greek, μαζί τα φάγαμε.) The People are not guileless, and The People are not always right. That’s always a useful corrective to realise.

I’m grateful I wasn’t around for the election of Syriza, “For the First Time, The True Left!” I’m grateful that my formative political experiences were not the sullen betrayal and dysfunction that Dimitris Almyrantis witnessed, a generation later. I’m grateful I got to taste some of the romance that comes before the Fall.

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In Australia, first generation Greek migrants were just as tribal about being Labor. The conservative parties were aggressively Anglo; Greeks in the Liberal party are a second and third generation thing. Those first generation Greek migrants were after all, for the most part, labourers. Menzies founded the Liberal party to appeal to the “forgotten” middle class of shopkeepers, but he never tried to grab the vote of the working man. (That was much later, under Howard.) So there was no question of the household aligning with Labor, and yelling “You ape” whenever Howard was on the TV. I don’t think they quite realised that the Labor vision was being traduced from under them until it was too late.

In Australia, Labor had the largesse and vision of Whitlam, who my parents venerated. An appalling manager of his caucus and of finances, I’ve learned latterly; but this was back when people expected politicians to do more than manage finances. It had Hawke, who charmed the people into reform, and it had Keating, the last left visionary the country has seen—though he was the pioneer of fiscal managerialism, he still dared to have big ideas, backed with an acid tongue.

And since then, we’ve had a queue of puny shopkeepers, reactionaries and reactive centrists, poll-spooked functionaries. And myself voting Australian Democrats while they still existed as a third party, then Australian Greens until the Greens were big enough for people to start talking about “tripartisan” consensus, and then the Australian Sex Party for the lulz. (Well, for the left-wing libertarianism. And the lulz.)

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So I was formed with a tribal allegiance to the Left, and with a vague notion of ferment and the People.

I’ve realised, gradually and annoyedly, that I’m not Left in the way I’d assumed I am. To the extent any of this crystallised, it was in my 30s and 40s rather than my 20s.

The axioms I’ve come to arrive at are:

1. Society must afford opportunity and equity to all. The State and redistribution of wealth are an appropriate mechanism of achieving this; and the individual owes a duty to the State, inasmuch as the State is going about this task.
2. Social cohesion and continuity matter, though not at the expense of opportunity and equity.
3. Individual freedom matters, though not at the expense of opportunity and equity. (And often not at the expense of social cohesion and continuity, but I concede that as more of a judgement call.)

Of these, (1) is Big Government left; it’s the overt continuation of where I started from, though much more socially aware than its tribal origin. (2) is a social conservatism I’m somewhat surprised by, but it’s there, bolstered by my thinking on nationalism and on my upbringing. It’s the covert continuation of where I started from, which I had not acknowledged because it did not fit the tribal narrative.

(3) is a libertarianism I’m also somewhat surprised by. A Libertarianism by Australian standards, at least, and a reaction to the curtailment of personal liberties that has emerged as a national consensus in Australia in the last couple of decades. (The stuff libertarians decry as the Nanny State.) I don’t think that reaction in me was led by reading so much; but it certainly has been informed by awareness of the American libertarian streak in political thinking (and not just its big-L Libertarian manifestation of wishing to drown the government in a bathtub).

Economically, I have come to appreciate that The Market can be a force for good, so long as it is appropriately shackled and regulated. I don’t look forward to the People’s appropriation of the Means of Production, because The People are not guileless; I don’t rule out a future where technocommunism makes sense (though I think climate catastrophe likelier), but in our current fallen circumstances, a regulated market seems to me the best compromise.

• Comrade Victoria Weaver, my teacher of technocommunism along with Star Trek, has said similar things to that in her less careful moments.
• My main intellectual exposure to theories of The Market has been, oddly enough, a historical linguistics textbook: On Language Change, which drew parallels between Smith’s “invisible hand” and the forces driving language change—individual selfish choices converging into a stable equilibrium.
• As for the shackling, I don’t know where I read it, but I was heartened to find Smith hated monopolies, as disrupting the equilibrium of the market. Preventing monopolies is where the State comes in. The State also comes in with infrastructure, and I’ve retained my faith in the State as the guarantor of collective welfare.

In the cartoons gathered up in Gallery of Awesomery, I have frequently had recourse to symbols, as shorthands of the Quora users I’m depicting. Many of them are taken from their profile pics, but not all. Here’s the symbols that haven’t.

• Michael Masiello: a beret, as befits an intellectual. A very very floppy beret.
• Lyonel Perabo: skis and a camera. He’s become so Nordic, skis are growing out of his feet.
• Sophia de Tricht: a sailor cap. She was formerly a sailor, and still swears like one.
• Scott Welch: a dart, and optionally a dartboard. The dartboard being Quora.
• Richard White: a stage mike. The guy’s a jazz singer.
• Sierra Spaulding: a bandana, and an inconspicuous doobie. Sierra’s a bit of a self-proclaimed hippie, even if she hasn’t quite used that wording.
• Mohammed Khateeb Kamran: the severed head of Han Solo. Khateeb accidentally a spoiler on the Star Wars movie cycle.
• Jeremy Markeith Thompson: a tux. Man’s a class act, and somehow the Nation Of Islam uniform seemed appropriate, even if he’s nothing to do with NOI.
• Habib Fanny: not socks! A stethoscope. And a laugh: my original nickname for him was not just Habib le toubib, but Habib le toubib qui rit: Habib the Laughing Medico.
• Mary C. Gignilliat: a pitchfork, doubling as a gardening hoe. She has the devil in her eyes, don’t ya know.
• Josephine Stefani: a bottle of Ararat brandy. We have bonded over having Armenian partners.
• Gigi J Wolf: a vintage air hostess hat. A nod to her professional background.
• Sam Murray: a packer and a clipboard. A packer, as Sam is bigender; a clipboard, through the anecdote she shared about arranging dates with a celebrity via an assistant.
• Michaelis Maus: a cigarette holder. A representation of the aesthete, whether sported by Audrey Hepburn or him.
• John Gragson: a British barrister’s wig. Even though he’s neither British nor a barrister.
• Victoria Weaver: an Ushanka. It befits her Stalinist persona, at least.
• Jennifer Edeburn: the scales of justice. Because her responses are so measured.
• Victor Goodwin: the claw of a lion. A very peeved lion. From his bio motto: tanquam ex ungue leonem.
• Peter Hawkins: a dumbbell. When he’s not explaining all there is to know about British politics, he does strength training.
• Vicky Prest: a treadmill. As a stand-in for all that cardiovascular exercise she’s been missing out on.
• Nikki Primrose: a Viking helmet. Because Danish.
• Desmond James: a rat. Which used to feature in his profile picture.

This question previously had question details. You can find them in the question comments.

What kind of people follow him? Those who are drawn in by his sartorial splendour, his wry anecdotes, and his way of looking at the world askance.

What kind of people keep following him? Those who find his brand of elegant nihilism bracing rather than off putting. Those who take it to heart when he excoriates us for staying stuck in The Matrix.

As well as those who never cull their list of followers.

🙂

I’d forgotten about this:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why did the Ancient Greeks refer to Ancient Blacks (the Ethiopians) as ‘blameless’ and ‘favored by the gods’? Also, what does it mean?

(Oh, God, not Afrocentric history, anything but that.)

Afrocentric pages online say Diodorus Siculus said:

“The Aethiopians (Ethiopians) are high favored with the gods, they were the first of all men created by the gods and were the founders of the Egyptian Civilization.”

Diodorus Siculus actually says this:

…

Comment:

I’m trying to understand your answer. A few thoughts:

1. Are you being a bigot? You seem to suggest in your writing the Ancient Greeks were all one type of people instead of mix of people with various identities.

You can read the exchange in situ; we were clearly talking past each other. You can accuse me of hastily accusing the OP of Afrocentrism (though I don’t think that was an unreasonable assumption) or of dismissing Afrocentrism (I was certainly dismissing the stuff I’d found written about the quote on Google). Bigotry seems a little far-fetched to me, especially as my answer was saying Greeks were being benign-racist towards Africans (“noble savage”). But… I think that’s as direct an accusation as I’ve had.

Achilleas Vortselas did speculate about the psychology of Quora critics in a comment (?) to me once, and spoke of “fellow-travellers”. But fellow-travellers is a hallowed company to keep, and I certainly thought the speculation was fair game!

In my experience in Australia, we slotted readily into the stereotype of Arts students in general. (Well, I didn’t: I was a refugee from Engineering.) Leftie do-gooders, dressed down, partial to cheap wine, mostly laid back.