Month: May 2017

As OP clarified elsewhere, the prevalent account for the name Hades is that it originally had a digamma in it, and meant Unseen: Hades – Wikipedia. Ἀϝίδης A-wídēs > Ἀΐδης Ā-ï´dēs > ᾌδης Ā´idēs. The archaic wid– stem for ‘see’ is the same as the stem vid– in Latin, and wit in English. (The terms for know and see were interchangable in Indo-European; in fact the Ancient Greek for ‘know’ is the perfect tense of the verb for ‘see’.)

It is also true that the Digamma ϝ, which represented the letter /w/ in Archaic Greek, eventually came to look like a ϛ in the Middle Ages, when it was only used to represent the number 6.

That’s all there is to OP’s claim. The rest… no:

• The digamma only started looking anything like a sickle in cursive writing in late antiquity—certainly after Christ.
• Even if Bean-Man (Cyamites) was Hades, and not just a local hero, his worship in Athens would have long predated the digamma looking like a sickle; he is mentioned in Pausanias.
• The digamma looked like an F from the time it was taken from Phoenecian, up until the time it was abandoned as a letter in the various dialects. (The numerical form had moved into a different glyph, that looked like a square C; that’s where the sickle shape comes from.) Bean-Man was celebrated in Athens, and Athens lost its /w/ before writing in Attic is attested.

So not only is it implausible that Bean-Man is somehow an allusion to the missing sickle-letter in Hades’ name; the time frames for Bean-Man, the sickle letter, and the pronunciation of /w/ in Hades are off by centuries.

Pahawh Hmong – Wikipedia

Pahawh is written left to right. Each syllable is written with two letters, an onset (la, an initial consonant or consonant cluster) and a rime (yu, a vowel, diphthong, or vowel plus final consonant). However, the order of these elements is rime-initial, the opposite of their spoken order. (That is, each syllable would seem to be written right to left, if it were transcribed literally into the Roman alphabet.) This is an indication that Shong conceived of the rimes as primary; Pahawh Hmong might therefore be thought of as a vowel-centered abugida. Tones and many onsets are distinguished by diacritics.

I’ve been here close to 2 years, and others have been 7. So using a year count would be self defeating.

Such a year count would only be relevant to topics about Quora. I’m quite happy with my somewhat adversarial, somewhat self parodying Quora credential as a Welchite. At any rate, I don’t think there is much to be learned about how Quora works, that you haven’t worked out within the first six months of being an engaged poster. (Well, that plus doing some research on the site.)

Being here for 2 years does mean I’m not an expert in being an “Old Planter” TW. And that’s ok by me.

Yes. BNBR is not an obvious notion to people who have commented to any significant extent on the Internet, and the requirement for BNBR is something users stumble on, not something they’re particularly alerted to. Quora’s particular notion of BNBR is far less intuitive than many are assuming it is: the tone policing, the expectation of deference towards public figures, the intolerance of several forms of humour.

Answerers are getting sidetracked into mechanisms of how the onboarding should be done, or how difficult it would be to ensure that people pay attention to onboarding. I would still retort that some onboarding is better than no onboarding, and no onboarding has been Quora’s MO for years now.

An update in the listing of my favourite people on Quora since January:

To: Melinda Gwin, Jennifer Edeburn, Daniel Ross, Vicky Prest, Nikki Primrose, Kat Rectenwald, Peter Hawkins, Emmanuel-Francis Nwaolisa Ogomegbunam, Desmond James, Eutychius Kaimakkamis, Alfredo Perozo, Martin Silvertant, Victor Goodwin, Kelvin Zifla, User-13249930999434776143

I love reading you, I love seeing you, I love bantering with you, and I love learning from you.

I love youse guys.

From the Arabic (and ultimately Persian) name for Greeks, Yunan < Ionian. See: Why are Greeks called Greek in English, Yunan in Turkish and Arabic, Ellines in Greek?

To answer the question more comprehensively: the distinction between an inclusive and an exclusive 1st person plural (we including you vs we excluding you) is Clusivity:

First-person clusivity is a common feature among Dravidian, Kartvelian, Caucasic, Australian and Austronesian, and is also found in languages of eastern, southern, and southwestern Asia, Americas, and in some creole languages. Some African languages also make this distinction, such as the Fula language. No European language outside the Caucasus makes this distinction grammatically, but some constructions may be semantically inclusive or exclusive.

…

The inclusive–exclusive distinction occurs nearly universally among the Austronesian languages and the languages of northern Australia, but rarely in the nearby Papuan languages. (Tok Pisin, an English-Melanesian pidgin, generally has the inclusive–exclusive distinction, but this varies with the speaker’s language background.) It is widespread in India (among the Dravidian and Munda languages, as well as in the Indo-European languages of Marathi, Rajasthani, Punjabi, Sindhi, and Gujarati, which borrowed it from Dravidian), and in the languages of eastern Siberia, such as Tungusic, from which it was borrowed into northern Mandarin Chinese. In indigenous languages of the Americas it is found in about half the languages, with no clear geographic or genealogical pattern. It is also found in a few languages of the Caucasus and Sub-Saharan Africa, such as Fulani and Khoekhoe.

It is, of course, possible in any language to express the idea of clusivity semantically, and many languages provide common forms that clarify the ambiguity of their first person pronoun (English “the rest of us”, Italian noialtri). A language with a true clusivity distinction, however, does not provide a first person plural with indefinite clusivity: where the clusivity of the pronoun is ambiguous; rather, the speaker is forced to specify – by choice of pronoun or inflection – whether he is including the addressee or not. This rules out most European languages, for example. Clusivity is nonetheless a very common language feature overall. Some languages with more than one plural number make the clusivity distinction only in, for example, the dual, but not in the greater plural. Others make it in all numbers. In the table below, the plural forms are the ones preferentially listed.

It will mean that @-notifications are finally working consistently, which will have meant that the Quora product design/design/UX team are actually paying attention to long-standing user requests. Prioritising them, even.

I think what would happen next is a well-functioning and more granular Stats page, a tamed and sensible Quora Content Review Bot, a Quora internal search with adequate retrieval, and raising comments to first class objects in Quora.

I would also expect to look out the window and see a squadron of pigs fly past in formation….

I’ve gotten an answer back from “a friend”, which I’m relaying:

Generally, the problems are:
1) parsing and post-tagging must be done in the same time (no good corpora means almost everything is based on rules)
2) severe polysemy if the text is without vowel marks (99.9% texts are without vowels)
3) no capitalization. means, all entity extraction rules are context-based. At the same time, Arab entities have a lot of names like city “City”, village “Village”, guy name “Good” etc

It’s just the first most crucial things which came in my mind.

How much content that you put online ten years ago is still accessible?

Even if Quora lasts forty years (!), why would they bother keeping your content accessible? People complain about being shown three year old content in their feeds now. There won’t be terribly much interest in content that old, which would only be of historic interest. It would get in the way of discovering new content, and there is a cost behind keeping content available on the live site. Quora may or may not keep the content in archives, but I think it unlikely you could pop back in to Quora and read 40 year old answers in your profile.

Even if Quora lasts forty years (!)

We are in an era now of obsolescence, of erasure of our histories. I pity anyone trying to do philology on contemporary texts. Archive your content: your hard drive is the best guarantee of permanence that you have—because you yourself will be motivated to upgrade your computer every few years, and copy your stuff across.