Month: June 2017

For a less emotive response, let us substitute Klingon with Norwegian, outside of Norway.

It is not child abuse to bring up your kid to speak only Norwegian in Australia. As another respondent said, if they arrive at primary school with no English, they will pick up English pretty quickly at school. As is the case for countless immigrant kids. And if the kids socialize at all outside the home, or watch TV, they will have picked up English anyway.

So the issue is not depriving a child with access to English.

Let’s substitute Norwegian with Esperanto, or Latin. There are, after all, something like 1000 native speakers of Esperanto. Have these kids been subjected to child abuse?

I mean, sure, their peers will think it’s weird and they will make fun of them. Their peers also made fun of the immigrant kids who ate weird food and looked different. And by all accounts, kids brought up speaking Esperanto end up perfectly well adjusted, although not many of them retain an interest in the language. Peer pressure is effective, after all.

And as I have said in a different answer, I’ve cyberstalked the kid who was brought up to speak Klingon (and lost interest), and I found a picture of him as a teenager in a mosh pit. I’m not worried about his long-term socialisation.

So what in this scenario makes people so aghast at Klingon? I’ve heard the child abuse accusation from professional linguists too. But a kid is hardly going to sustain brain damage from a language that violates a couple of phonological universals. No one should be taking Chomsky that seriously. If a kid can deal with a pidgin as linguistic input, and come up with a creole, they can certainly deal with Klingon. Not to mention, any Klingon that a parent would produce day to day would not be all that alien.

The only rationale for a claim of child abuse would be fear of difference and fear of unconventionality. Hippies have done far worse to kids.

‘Turn turk’ in the Renaissance meant to convert to Islam. The Turks were the Muslims that the English had the most contact with, through the Ottoman Empire.

A Christian Turn’d Turk (1612) is a play by the English dramatist Robert Daborne. It concerns the conversion of the pirate John Ward to Islam.

Because of the entrenched association of peoples until recent times with religion, changing religion was broadly regarded as betraying one’s core principles, and being literally faithless, renegade. It is so used, metaphorically, in Shakespeare:

• [Hamlet, Hamlet to Horatio] if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me (if my fortune betrays me)
• [Much Ado About Nothing, Margaret to Beatrice] an you be not turned Turk, there’s no more sailing by the star. (Margaret alludes to the fact that Beatrice has fallen in love with Benedick, despite her protestations: as complete a change as someone converting to Islam)

Hence, surprisingly enough, an accurate definition in, of all places, Urban Dictionary: to turn turk:

To turn turk is to be a twat and back stab people

Bad that lad didn’t expect him to turn turk on you

Chambers’ Twentieth Century Dictionary adds: “to go to the bad: to become hopelessly obstinate”. The value judgement of Islam = bad is what you’d expect from a majority Christian culture; the obstinacy is surprising, unless it is the generic obstinacy of a renegade.

For Modern Greek:

• parea ‘group of people hanging out socially’. Either our solitary Catalan loan, or one of our few Ladino loans, from parea (Spanish pareja) ‘couple’. The Catalan etymology is seductive, as it involves the Catalan Company, a parea marauding the Greek countryside.
• tsonta ‘porn film’. From Venetian zonta ‘joined on’ (Italian giunta); originally meant ‘freebie, lagniappe, baker’s dozen’. Which tells you a lot about Greek cinema practice in the 50s, and their male audiences.
• teknó ‘toyboy, twink’. From Romani tiknó ‘small child’, via Kaliarda, the Romani-based Greek gay secrecy language, influenced by Church Greek téknon ‘(spiritual) child’.
• varvatos ‘macho, manly’. From Latin barbatus ‘bearded’.
• glamouria ‘glamour (sarcastically), flashiness’. From English glamour (itself ultimately from Greek grammatikē via Scots), + the colloquial suffix –ja ‘a strike of something’.
• zamanfou ‘indifference, complacency’. From French je m’en fous ‘I don’t give a fuck’. Also zamanfoutistas ‘I don’t give a fuck-ist’, zamanfoutismos ‘I don’t give a fuck-ism’.

If someone does not have the Message link on their profile, they have blocked messaging—which is their right. If you want to communicate with them, leave them a comment. Unless they’ve disabled those too, in which case, all you can do is move on.

It used to; the [j] was regularly dropped after certain consonants:

Phonological history of English consonant clusters – Wikipedia

The change of [ɪ] to [j] in these positions (as described above) produced some clusters which would have been difficult or impossible to pronounce; this led to what John Wells calls Early Yod Dropping, in which the [j] was elided in the following environments:

• After /ʃ, tʃ, dʒ/, for example chute /ʃuːt/, chew /tʃuː/, juice /dʒuːs/
• After /j/, for example yew /juː/ (compare [jɪʊ̯] in some conservative dialects)
• After /r/, for example rude /ruːd/
• After stop+/l/ clusters, for example blue /bluː/

Apparently Welsh and some other dialects kept [ju] as [ɪu], did not undergo yod dropping, and as a result they pronounce chews /tʃɪʊ̯z/ and choose /tʃuːz/ differently. I can’t tell from Wikipedia whether that extends to rude being pronounced as ree-ood.

The claim, Googling tells me, comes from Homo Prospectus (2016), by Martin Seligman et al. Its programmatic claim is that:

Our species is misnamed. Though sapiens defines human beings as “wise” what humans do especially well is to prospect the future. We are homo prospectus.

If the title is to be more accurate, then we would need to concede that (a) humans are not necessarily more ‘wise’ than chimps or dolphins or crows, and more importantly (b) that what is distinctive about human intelligence is the ability to envision a future, a mental model of time.

The attribute that usually gets brought up as unique to human intelligence is self-awareness. Googling tells me that George Herbert Mead, at least, made much of awareness of the future as part of the human mind’s ability to reflect on its self, as a defining attribute of human intelligence. (https://books.google.com.au/book…)

So, maybe? At least one psychologist seems to have thought so. Animals do plan for the future; I gather it’s still controversial to what extent they have a mental model of the future.

And thanks for the vote of confidence in A2A’ing me, Rynnah. That was a lot of googling and guesswork. 🙂

Historically, the distinction between adjectives and nouns is a fairly recent one—not entrenched before the 18th century. The classical grammars referred to nominals, which included adjectives and nouns.

In addition, Greek, unlike English but like many other languages, can routinely use adjectives on their own without a noun. In fact, neuter adjectives were how Classical philosophers referred to abstractions: τὸ ἴσον, “the equal”, was how someone like Plato would refer to Equality.

There is only one way in which Ancient Greek adjectives differ morphologically from nouns. Feminine 1st declension nouns that are accented on the penult in the singular are accented on the penult in the plural: κινάρα ‘artichoke’, κινάραι ‘artichokes’. If a feminine adjective is accented on the penult in the singular, it is accented on the antepenult in the plural, by analogy with the masculine plural: δεύτερος, δευτέρα: δεύτεροι, δεύτεραι (not: δευτέραι).

With typical cluelessness, 19th century grammars say that ethnic names are an exception to the accentuation rule for nouns: Ῥοδία “Rhodian woman”, Ῥόδιαι “Rhodian women”, not the expected Ῥοδίαι. But of course, that isn’t an exception at all. That just shows you that to Ancient Greeks, Ῥόδιαι was not a noun but an adjective.

Fascinating question.

I mean, adjectives and nouns have declensions, and so do articles and pronouns. If an article is going to have a declension, better it have a declension that’s strongly associated with genders (since gender signalling is a core function of adjectives), than the third declension, which did not differentiate masculines and feminines. The first declension is feminine, with distinct-looking masculines as a late development in proto-Greek; the second declension is masculine/neuter, with feminines as an occasional exception. So they did correlate with gender strongly.

Of course, most pronouns share the alternation of first and second declension that adjectives have anyway; and the article originated as a pronoun.

There’s probably some Indo-European behind why so many pronouns decline that way, patterning with adjectives and indicating gender overtly; then again, the first declension was a late development in Indo-European.

Perfect? Maybe. But careful with your direction of causation. The first declension appeared probably a millennium before the articles did; the articles had the form they did because the declensions were a good match for gender, and that was something that happened in adjectives way beforehand.

Third declension adjectives do exist, and third declension nouns definitely exist; they don’t differentiate masculine and feminine, and there aren’t as many pronouns in the third declension. (Of course, τίς, τί ‘who’ is hardly an obscure pronoun.) By some criteria, I guess that makes them less perfect. By some, they’re rather more perfect…

Not quite “not worth living”. The Greek is more absolute than that.

I’ve been feeling guilty about Nick Nicholas’ answer to Since the active and middle voices of the 2nd aorist forms of “to stand” are intransitive (ἵστημι – ἔστην vs ἐστάμην), are these forms synonymous?, where I basically dismissed nuance in Ancient Greek as something transitory, and not to get too hung up about. The rendering of Plato’s maxim is an instance where there is a little bit of nuance, and I’m hijacking this question to do penance.

I could have done Sappho instead; her second best known poem, Aphrodite of the dappled throne, has Aphrodite repeat three times δηὖτε, which gets translated as ‘again’:

you, Blessed One,
with a smile on your unaging face
asking again what have I suffered
and why am I calling again

and in my wild heart what did I most wish
to happen to me: “Again whom must I persuade
back into the harness of your love?
Sappho, who wrongs you?

It doesn’t just mean ‘again’. It means ‘but now too’. It’s double-emphasised. You can see Aphrodite actually rolling her eyes: “what have you suffered THIS time, and why are you invoking me THIS time, and who do I have to persuade THIS time?”

But I’m alighting on Plato instead. So.

Ancient Greek has participles. It has oodles of participles. It has actives and middles and passives. It has future and past and progressive [present] and perfective.

And that’s not what Plato used. Plato used verbal adjectives.

There are two types of verbal adjective in Greek. The first ends in –teos, and corresponds to the Latin gerundive; it means ‘should be X-ed’. So zētēteon ‘should be sought’ is the term for a logical problem. erastea is someone who should be loved, corresponding to Latin Amanda.

So Plato could have used biōteos, ‘should be lived, is to be lived’. But he didn’t. He used biōtos: ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ, ho de anexetastos bios ou biōtos anthrōpōi. “But the unexamined life is not lived for a human.”

Biōtos, and for that matter anexetastos, are the second type of verbal adjective. They kind of mean the same thing as a passive participle. But a participle is still a verb: it has an agent, and it has a time, and it has an aspect. An adjective doesn’t: it just is.

So if you take the verb passō ‘to sprinkle, to salt’, you could say that fish is passomenos ‘being salted’, or pastheis ‘that was salted’ or pepasmenos ‘that has been salted’. But you don’t. You just say fish is pastos, ‘salted’. You don’t care when, you don’t care by who. In fact, the question of when or by who does not really even make sense; it’s an adjective, it just is.

When it’s negated, the notion of it being a state, and not an event, is even stronger. Anexetastos ‘unexamined’ is such a negated verbal adjective. It doesn’t mean ‘currently not being examined by someone’ (mē exetazomenos), or that it didn’t get examined (mē exetastheis); it’s just unexamined. Examination doesn’t happen around it.

In fact negative verbal adjectives connote so strongly that the event doesn’t happen, they are often translated into Latin and Western languages with adjectives indicating impossibility. ‘Indeclinable’ in Greek is aklitos, un-declined. Because it’s an adjective and not a participle, the notion of who does the declining does not even show up, and the notion of when the declining happens and whether it’s ongoing does not show up. It just is.

Same here. An anexetastos life is not a life that didn’t get examined by someone at some time. It just isn’t examined.

Same with biōtos. Plato doesn’t use biōteos, “shouldn’t be lived”, so a notion of ‘worth living’ isn’t there. He said it is not lived. Not by someone, at some time: it’s just not lived at all. Any more than a preposition is declined, or a whale is examined. In fact, abiōtos gets rendered as ‘unlivable’. LSJ translates it as “not to be lived, insupportable”; the implication is that the situation is no more able to sustain life than the lunar surface.

I mean, sure, ‘worth living’ is sometimes an appropriate rendering. Aristophanes in Plutus says Abiōton einai moi pepoiēke ton bion, “he’s made my life be unlivable”, and the expression has been revived in Modern Greek: mu ekane to vio avioto “he made my life unlivable”. (abiōtos had not survived in Modern Greek, but verbal adjectives have, so Greeks still have an intuitive understanding of the expression) In English, we would say “he made my life not worth living”. But the Greek is more absolute: “there’s no life to be had there”.

And Plato did not say abiōtos either. He went one step further: he said, not ‘unlivable’ (or ‘unlived’), but ‘not lived’ (or ‘not livable’): ou biōtos. It’s just that bit more emphatic.

What did Plato mean? The tone is all wrong, but it comes across as something like: “An unexamined life? That’s not living. For anyone.”

Of course there is.

This subject underwent extensive research by the now departed Laura Hale: Laura Hale’s answer to In what ways does the Indian Quora differ from the American Quora? Part of that research shows that Indians tend to follow other Indians, and engage with them, and Americans other Americans.

This is a tendency that is all to do with what people feel comfortable with. (Note Laura’s finding that Indians are likelier to follow Asian Americans than White Americans.) The two national communities of American and Indian users are large enough on Quora for this to be feasible; users from countries with smaller representation on Quora can’t do the same. Hence, Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why is the Indian community of Quora termed as “self-contained”?