James Garry’s 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? This is the answer to this question. And my thanks, James.

What I’m writing here is an answer to a more general question: how much do active/middle voice distinctions matter? It’s an elaboration of Nick Nicholas’ answer to In Ancient Greek, does the middle voice of φιλέω (φιλέομαι) mean “I love in my own interest,” “I love myself,” (reflexive) or “I am loved” (passive)?

My thanks for your indulgence.

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English distinguishes between Active and Passive verbs. The distinction is fairly clear cut. An intransitive verb is always active. If a transitive verb is active, the subject is doing stuff; if the transitive verb is passive, the subject is having stuff done to them.

Homeric Greek worked on a different, Active/Middle distinction; in many ways, that distinction has lasted to this day. In that distinction, if a verb is transitive, the active still means you’re doing stuff, and the middle means you’re having stuff done to you. Or that you’re doing it to yourself. Or that you’re doing it for yourself. Or that you’re doing it to each other.

And that’s the easy bit.

What happens when the verb is intransitive?

When the verb is intransitive, it could be active, or it could be middle.

There is a kind of semantics to it. Kind of. If the intransitive verb is active, it means that you’re doing stuff, you’re acting. If the intransitive verb is middle, it means that you’re just sitting there, that you’re passive—or at least, that your actions are inward. So run or go are active. Work or sleep are middle.

Does that distinction sound unconvincing? Good. Because it was.

I mean, the distinction was there. But it was not stable, and it was not consistent, and it was not rigorous.

The distinction was inconsistent enough that some intransitive verbs got to be either active or middle; lampō ‘shine’, for example. In fact, some perfectly transitive verbs also got to be either. So for lambanō, there is an active usage, meaning ‘take’, and a middle usage, meaning ‘take hold of, seize’.

Now, if you are approaching grammar synchronically, like a good structuralist, any contrast in grammatical form must correspond to some contrast in meaning. There has to be some nuance there; some notion of more active vs more passive, some connotation picked up from other actives or middles, some subtlety. It can’t just be random.

People speaking the language at a point in time have good reason to think so. Writers are certainly going to be alert to all the connotations and resonances latent in the language, and they will exploit them. Yes, synchronically there is no such thing as a true synonym.

If you’re working in the diachronic model, you are much more cynical about structuralist notions of paradigm and meaning distinctions, because your business involves watching those structures morph and evaporate.

It’s an overly fuzzy view of language. It’s why a century of Indo-European historical linguistics, which focussed primarily on phonology, did not come up with a concept of the phoneme: it was too busy seeing sounds change to work out the structure of sounds. But it’s a healthy cynicism to bring to bear, when there are overly subtle nuances in play. Even if they’re there, they’re evanescent.

The instance that has made me sceptical about fine active/middle nuances in Greek is phaîo. It’s a verb I spent hours trying to work out in Pindar: The tale of φαῖο.

I couldn’t work it out, because it wasn’t in the grammar books: the 19th century editions of Pindar, that the grammar books were based on, used the active optative of ‘you would say’, φαίης, and that’s what the grammars had documented. The 1971 edition of Pindar switched to the middle optative φαῖο. Both forms turn up in manuscripts.

‘Say’ is one of those intransitive verbs that could appear in the active or in the middle (in the optative mood in particular). Was there a subtle semantics involved? Was there a notion of actively saying something versus passively saying something? Like, asserting versus conceding, or something like that?

Nah. It’s much simpler than that. It’s a dialect difference. Attic used the active in the optative of phēmi ‘say’; Doric, the dialect of Pindar, used the middle. (The edition switched the voice, because they figured that the scribes that had copied Pindar over the generations were more familiar with Attic than Doric.) Attic used the active and Doric the middle, not because Athenians were more assertive than Spartans, or anything like that. It was simply a random choice, that the dialects made in one mood of one verb, when they split apart.

Just like Greek, a few centuries later, replaced the middle ergazomai ‘work’ with the active douleuō ‘originally: to slave away’. No nuance there. Not in the long run: in the long run, nuance gets squashed and overrun by the shifts of language.

Lucky are those who settle down to a single period of language, that delve into its treasures, and that look upon its nuance and subtleties and paradigmatic contrasts as something more substantial, more rich, more verdant—than the cobwebs that Time knows them to be.

Don’t weep for historical linguists, though. We have our own entertainments. And sometimes, we pause to read the literature too, and let go of our cynicism.

(of course there could be a option to select)

Quora design philosophy, such as it is, is antithetical to any notion of user options. So you can discount that.

Quora has a follower network. Answers show up in people’s feeds, from writers they like (for whatever reason), divorced from the context of other answers to the same question; and people are usually not strongly enough motivated to open up a tab and see what anyone else had to say. If people like a writer, they will upvote their stuff. If people like a writer because of their personality and style, and aren’t extremely interested in the question itself, they won’t look at other answers and weigh them up.

I mean, *I* do. But I might do it once every 20 or 30 items in my feed. How often do you?

So yes, Quora has cultivated a culture of popular writers, because (despite its embarrassment over it) it does have a social network underlying it. And without the social network, it wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near the level of engagement, or free feedback and tagging, that it does. It’s a price to be paid.

It could make it slightly easier to access alternate answers to the same question, I guess, as some sort of preview in the feed. But then again, how many people would click through to those alternates?

I didn’t get to know my paternal grandparents well; I met my grandfather only once, my grandmother twice. My grandmother was somewhat vague by the time I met her, and I had real trouble with her dialect. My grandfather was vaguely feared, but I couldn’t particularly see why at eight years of age; I hadn’t been brought up in his hardscrabble household, after all.

My maternal grandparents, I got to know well. My grandfather was proud, unsmiling, stern. He was the village beadle, and a denizen of good standing in the community. He was descended from Sfakia, the southwest of the island, where people pursue vendettas and dress in permanent black, and think dancing beneath them. He was slightly out of place in the village in easternmost Crete, where people are relaxed and docile, and do not shoot firearms into the air at weddings. He ran a cafe in the upper village, before my time; I could not understand how—the kafedzis is supposed to be the life of the party.

He wasn’t cold, as such, although perhaps more affectionate to infants than to children. But critical, and very concerned with public perception. When I’d goof off as a teenager, he’d scowl Λίγη σοβαρότης δε βλάφτει. “A bit of seriousness wouldn’t do you any harm.”

He often said that if he was ever debilitated, they should give him rat poison: he was too proud a man to want to go without command of his faculties. He was felled by two strokes, and lived out his final days with no faculties, and no rat poison. He deserved a better end than that.

My grandmother was—is—as cheerful as my grandfather was stern, and as kindly as he was critical. She’d laugh a lot, with a gentle chuckle, and often without much obvious cause. She’d still get annoyed about things, often including me goofing off. But her annoyance never lasted long.

She’s still going at 94, although not quite there as much as she was. Then again, she’s more there than her children allow. When my wife and I visited her, she asked my wife’s name, and when she was trying to pronounce “Tamar”, my uncle jumped in and hollered “Maria! Her name’s Maria!” (A generation of Albanian migrants can testify to Greeks refusing to learn foreign names.) My grandmother chuckled, “Well, I guess I’ll call you Maria then.” In fact, here’s the footage:

Herewith:

Vocaroo | Voice message

• Nick Nicholas
• Νίκος Νικολάου
• Niĉjo Nicholas
• nIchyon
• la nitcion.
• That Guy Who Runs The Necrologue And Keeps Complaining About Quora

Originally Answered:

How does Plato call Socrates?

Of course, we don’t have transcripts by Plato of chats with Socrates, we have dialogues he made up. But Socrates is constantly addressed in Plato’s dialogues as “O Socrates” (ὦ Σώκρατες), with monotonous regularity—over 1200 times in the works of Plato. Socrates in turn addresses his trollees (er, interlocutors) as “O partner” or “o good man” (ὦ ἑταῖρε, ὠγαθέ).

Modern Greek has nasal Sandhi. That means that following a word ending in /n/, any voiceless stop is voiced. (And in the case of /ks/ and /ps/, so is the following /s/.) The /n/ in turn assimilates in place of articulation to what follows.

So:

• patera “father”, san patera [sam batera] “like a father”
• keo “I burn”, ðen keo [ðeŋ ɡeo] “I don’t burn”
• psixi “soul”, stin psixi [stim bziçi] “to the soul”
• kseno “stranger”, ton kseno [toŋ ɡzeno] “the stranger”

As any search for “Quora” on Upwork will show, plenty of people are being paid to write answers on Quora, without being state agents. Quora has strictures against spam; it does not have strictures that I know of against propaganda.

From my outside perspective, I keep thinking Quora is one bad news story away from being in a world of hurt. But the bad news story hasn’t happened since 2014. And at least this year they’ve hired a lawyer.

Spam is not the right category for suspected professional propaganda or astroturf, but it’s close enough to serve for reporting, and it’s better than mere “factually inaccurate”. Do give an argument for your suspicion if you make a report, though.

Being a foreign word ending in a non-Greek ending, there is no plural. In Modern Greek, if a noun ends in something other than a vowel or sigma, it can’t be declined. (Nu is archaic; rho xi psi even more so.) So το βαμπίρ, τα βαμπίρ.

I see that at least one person online has named themselves Vampirissa “vampiress”, forming a feminine of the form. But that would be considered informal usage: formal usage would just put a feminine article in front of βαμπίρ.

There is a reason unassimilated loanwords suck.

As other answers have pointed out, the vrikolakas is an indigenous Greek creature rising from the grave, with its own mythology, which is only somewhat similar with that of the vampire. Andreas Karkavitsas‘ harrowing novella The Beggar (1897) depicts the associated superstitions in detail.

When I was a kid, as far as I remember, the Vampires of Eastern Europe or Hollywood were rendered as vrikolakas. They now appear to be rendered as vampir. If you are referring to the vampires of western popular culture, as opposed to blood drinking beings that people used to actually be afraid of, vampir is a safe bet.

You know, for someone who has said publicly that they have made their peace with the market, I’m still scoring pretty socialist. For someone who despairs of the morass of modern Western democracy, I’m still scoring pretty democratic. For someone who thinks globalisation is proving a mistake, I’m still scoring pretty internationalist. And for someone who thinks there is more to tradition than the (non-American) Western consensus admits, I’m still scoring pretty progressive.

I don’t think the problem is the test (although I did put in some “neutral” answers). I think the problem is that I keep thinking I really am supposed to be Ché Guevara, and I’m a disappointment when I turn out to be a mere Fabian…