Month: May 2017

Ooh. That’s a tough one, and I’m going to want backup on this.

• The nationalist writers of the 1890s: Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. Culturally defining figures.
• At the same time, the Heidelberg School of painters (back when Heidelberg was on the outskirts of Melbourne, instead of suburbia); just as strongly defining of Australia’s self-perception, and the mythologising of the bush.
• I’m not a visual arts guy, but Sidney Nolan in the 1940s was another mythic figure.
• The Whitlam prime ministership. Seismic shift in Australian self-perception, and seismic shift in funding of the arts.
• Australian film in the 1970s and 1980s, from Picnic in Hanging Rock through to Mad Max.

For what is a schwa, I refer you to What is the schwa in linguistics?, and Schwa – Wikipedia. It is the “neutral”, mid central vowel.

You’ll find the schwa in lots and lots of languages, including English (uh…. ; about; and in fact most unstressed vowels of English). You won’t find it in Ancient Greek.

Schwa used to be reconstructed in Proto-Indo-European though, as the phoneme behind the correspondence of i in Indic to a in Greek. For example, pitár ~ patēr was reconstructed as *pəter-. The distribution of the “schwa indogermanicum” was somewhat problematic, and it is now more economically reconstructed as a syllabic laryngeal (*p-h̥₂ter-); it’s plausible that in late Indo-European, the earlier syllabic laryngeal would have been pronounced as a schwa.

Spam detectives

Steven de Guzman, who was the main poster to the blog and spam detective, got banned three times. The third ban has stuck.

Quora does not like this blog, and in fact thinks that it is getting in the way of them doing their own job. See the arguments between Timothy Wingerter (Quora employee at the time) and Guzman in comments; e.g. https://spamdetectives.quora.com…, https://spamdetectives.quora.com…, and especially https://spamdetectives.quora.com….

(Do read that last comment, even if it is quite long. It’s very rare that we hear anything from Quora employees about what they’re doing, and Wingerter does make a cogent argument for why they don’t want their spam process usurped by users.)

Not to mention Is Spam Detectives at risk of being deleted? by Steven de Guzman on Spam detectives, and Incorrectly banned on @Quora for allegedly having sock puppet accounts (Part 2) —Steve’s second ban was rescinded on the condition that he did not continue to report spam, which he did not adhere to. (His return prompted Wingerter’s comment that he’d rather the blog did not exist.)

Read the blog and comments, talk to other posters there, and make your own assessment; but anecdotally, if you link to or repost too much spam, the bots and/or mods will mistake you for a spammer, or find that your efforts are getting in the way of their efforts, and take action against you.

There’s no shortage of Chinese speakers here, and they’ll give better informed answers than me. But:

Mandarin Chinese is not Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese was a bit of a scholarly game, and writers relished the ambiguity of the homophones and the overall oracularity of it all. People in real life don’t, and Mandarin has dealt with homophony the way many languages do, by adding disambiguating words. Though people still have fun with Homophonic puns in Mandarin Chinese.

So the word for bat, fú 蝠, is homophonous with the word for good fortune, fú 福, and as a result bats commonly feature in Chinese art. But people who actually speak the language don’t call bats fú. They call them 蝙蝠 biānfú, combining two words for bat.

For another instance of ambiguity, look at Megan Cox’s answer to What are some homophones in Mandarin Chinese?. As Megan points out, there is homophony between bīng 冰 ‘ice’ and bìng 病 ‘illness, esp. mental illness’.

That’s not as homophonous as it gets; bīng 兵 (soldier) is a true homophone, and Wikipedia’s article on homophonic puns reports that in 1882, when there was fear of rebellions around Beijing, the sale of ice was banned as a result.

But even with that near homophony of bīng and bìng, Megan as a learner of Chinese may have been confused, yelling 你有病吗？ “Have you got a mental illness?” at the convenience store when she thought she was asking for ice. But the shop owner worked out what was going on, and he wouldn’t have been confused if she was fluent in Chinese. Ice as a noun is not bīng 冰 , but bīngkuài 冰块 ‘ice piece, ice cube’. So it would never be ambiguous with the noun bìng 病 ‘illness’.

A non-trivial one. The meaning needs to be captured, and the meaning is that “it is no more than what it already is; we are stuck with it.” Which means I’d rather render the second is as ‘become’, ‘end up’.

Est sicut factum est “it is as it has become” is a start.

Ut fit sic sit “as it becomes, so let it be” is catchier, though perhaps it goes in a different direction (“if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”).

Est id, quidquid fit “Whatever it is becoming, it’s that” is maybe a bit closer.

In Melbourne:

“Pure” Armenian? There was an Armenian Cafe restaurant before I got together with my wife, but that’s long closed.

There’s Sezar | Modern Armenian Restaurant, which is Nouveau Armenian (Nouveau, as most upmarket ethnic restaurants in Melbourne are). We’ve been once, and it wasn’t strikingly “pure”. Pleasant, though rather heavy.

It’s next door to Armenia, and the cuisine is quite different, but I have much affection for the Georgian cuisine of the Umbrella Lounge Bar.

I’ve been A2A’d this question, which strikes me as odd. I am pretty urban, and as a friend once said, I’m ok with fauna as long as it stays the hell the other side of the car window.

So the following recommendation is made more on character and writing, than on my capacity to judge his expertise.

Rory Young

Rory writes less than he used to, and never was voluminous. But Rory is a Mensch fighting the good fight, and is well worth your time.

Because to the Greeks, the people who spoke about him the most, and whose historical accounts influenced the West’s understanding of Alexander the most, saying he was Greek wouldn’t mean anything: they were Greek themselves, after all. But saying he was from Macedon meant a lot to Greeks: Macedon had a marginal presence in Classical antiquity, then all of a sudden conquered the world. (That’s not taking a side on how Greek the Ancient Macedonians were, btw.) And Macedon was the state he was the king of, not Greece.

If you want some parallels, try George W Bush: to Americans, and indeed to the Anglosphere, the fact that he was (or rather, proclaimed himself to be) Texan was noteworthy; the fact that he was American was taken as given. And Franz-Joseph was the emperor of Austria–Hungary; we don’t refer to him as Austrian.

I was hoping to find instances of the people he conquered calling him Alexander the Greek, but it doesn’t look like it. Hebrew per Wikipedia (אלכסנדר הגדול – ויקיפדיה) uses Alexander the Great אלכסנדר הגדול or Alexander of Macedon אלכסנדר מוקדון. Ditto Arabic per Wikipedia (الإسكندر الأكبر – ويكيبيديا، الموسوعة الحرة): Alexander the Great (الإسكندر الأكبر، والإسكندر الكبير) or Alexander of Macedon (الإسكندر المقدوني), or Alexander the Two-Horned (الإسكندر ذو القرنين)—though per Alexander the Great in the Quran – Wikipedia, the earliest identification of the Two-Horned One of the Quran with Alexander, in the 9th century, referred to him as Greek:

Dhu al-Qarnain is Alexander the Greek, the king of Persia and Greece, or the king of the east and the west, for because of this he was called Dhul-Qarnayn [meaning, ‘the two-horned one’]

Longer than 10 years; I’ve certainly seen forms like that, but they were routinely used in the 19th century. From the following, it wasn’t just one authority that made a single decision; it’s been incremental and exception-ridden, although (from footnotes) the big authorities like Fowler and Hart were influential in advocating against 19th century forms like Brahms’ and James’:

Apostrophe – Wikipedia

Many respected authorities recommend that practically all singular nouns, including those ending with a sibilant sound, have possessive forms with an extra s after the apostrophe so that the spelling reflects the underlying pronunciation. Examples include Oxford University Press, the Modern Language Association, the BBC and The Economist. Such authorities demand possessive singulars like these: Senator Jones’s umbrella; Tony Adams’s friend. Rules that modify or extend the standard principle have included the following:

• If the singular possessive is difficult or awkward to pronounce with an added sibilant, do not add an extra s; these exceptions are supported by The Guardian, Yahoo! Style Guide, and The American Heritage Book of English Usage. Such sources permit possessive singulars like these: Socrates’ later suggestion; or Achilles’ heel if that is how the pronunciation is intended.
• Classical, biblical, and similar names ending in a sibilant, especially if they are polysyllabic, do not take an added s in the possessive; among sources giving exceptions of this kind are The Times and The Elements of Style, which make general stipulations, and Vanderbilt University, which mentions only Moses and Jesus. As a particular case, Jesus’ is very commonly written instead of Jesus’s – even by people who would otherwise add ’s in, for example, James’s or Chris’s. Jesus’ is referred to as “an accepted liturgical archaism” in Hart’s Rules.

Although less common, some contemporary writers still follow the older practice of omitting the extra s in all cases ending with a sibilant, but usually not when written -x or -xe. Some contemporary authorities such as the Associated Press Stylebook recommend or allow the practice of omitting the extra “s” in all words ending with an “s”, but not in words ending with other sibilants (“z” and “x”). The 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style [2003] recommended the traditional practice, which included providing for several exceptions to accommodate spoken usage such as the omission of the extra s after a polysyllabic word ending in a sibilant, but the 16th edition [2010] no longer recommends omitting the extra “s”.

From Is Jesus’ or Jesus’s the Possessive Jesus?, Jesus’s has been advocated in non-liturgical use at least as far back as the original Hart’s Rules in 1904.

Recall Scott Welch: When do you think Quora is going to end?: Scott Welch’s speculation that Google Traffic is what will keep Quora in money forever—and the existing userbase is an expendable loss-leader.

I was intrigued to read this speculation, from the time Cheever was ousted, that Cheever was pro cultivating the existing userbase, and D’Angelo was pro encouraging Google Traffic. Maybe the poster really was on to something….

One suspects there’s a lot less going on than what everyone would like to think…. (comment on: The Sudden, Mysterious Exit Of A Quora Cofounder Has Silicon Valley Baffled)

One suspects there’s a lot less going on than what everyone would like to think. (Thanks, ChuckMcM, for the nice post about money and stock.)

Mr Cheever is “something of a product design genius, and lots of people give him credit for Facebook’s best features;” even the now-removed-from-Quora post says “to him the user came first and growth features would sacrifice that.” That puts him in complete opposition to the guy (Mr D’Angelo, who to his credit is putting his money where his mouth is) who is paying the bills.

The problem is that almost every Q&A type site has the same issue as Quora: only a small percentage of its membership is actively engaged. The number cited by the article is eight per cent, and in my experience, that’s about par for the course. Since revenues (and therefore stock performance) are directly tied to use, there are two ways to increase revenues, with implications regarding the user experience for both:

1. Increase traffic, AKA “make the pie bigger”. This means doing the kinds of things Mr D’Angelo probably championed — the SEO Solution, playing nice with Google, low barriers to entry (i.e. Free). This is the tactic taken by most startups, since they’re generally looking at Mountain View and saying “Gee, if we could just get our hands wet in THAT revenue stream, we’d be rich.”

2. Keep your existing userbase more engaged, AKA “get your customers to eat more pie”. This means doing the kinds of things Mr Cheever championed — making the experience better, providing more services to them, concentrating on getting lifelong customers rather than more customers for less time. Most startups aren’t in it for the long haul; they’re in it for the big payday.

The NYTimes obit of Arthur Sulzberger pointed out the difference. His family has always wanted to be in the business of disseminating the news; their competitors are in the business of selling advertising. Mr Cheever wanted to take care of users; Mr D’Angelo wants to see a return on his investment. If there was ever a startup in the position to do the former, it’s Quora; I know my colleagues would dearly love to have enough money to where they wouldn’t have to worry for a while how to keep the lights on.

But as William F. Buckley noted a long time ago, “Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive,” and that’s when someone like Mr Cheever moves on to his next venture.