Month: July 2017

It’s inserting Justine Damond’s name into the protest chant “If we don’t get it [justice], shut it down”, which has become associated with Black Lives Matter among others, and which also turns up as the hashtag #shutitdown:

Justice: If We Don’t Get It, Shut It Down! (with images, tweets) · krissmissed

If We Don’t Get It, Shut It Down

Chanting Hashtags and Hashtagging Chants – The Civic Beat – Medium

“If we don’t get it, shut it down” has been a common chant at rallies—in other words, “If we don’t get justice, shut down the system.” The chant you hear in this video also includes the names of individuals who have died. At protest events, the names of those who passed are often transformed into hashtags, like #MikeBrown and #EricGarner.

As a surname, Rawnie turns up very rarely in Lanarkshire, Scotland (http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-b…).

As a first name, Rawnie is indeed English Romani, from the Romani rani for ‘lady’ (Message: “Re: Romani names”); it corresponds e.g. to Hungarian Romani Aranya (https://books.google.com.au/book…)

MacKenzie is an Anglicisation (with garbled yogh) of MacCoinnich = Son of Kenneth: Mackenzie (surname) – Wikipedia.

Pidgins have limited vocabularies, because they are by their nature sparse languages, and pidgins sound like colonial language babytalk, because paternalism. And some of the more amusing Pidgin coinages, we can be reasonably sure, are the colonials poking fun at the natives yet again, rather than genuinely used circumlocutions.

Such as, for example, the notorious pseudo-Bislama expression for a piano (Vanuatu: Important Phrases):

Wan bigfala blak bokis hemi gat waet tut mo hemi gat blak tut, sipos yu kilim smol, hemi singaot gud.

Literally; One big fella black box, him he got white tooth and (or more/in addition to) him he got black tooth, suppose you kill him small (strike or hit lightly) him he sing out good.

Yeah… no, as we would say in Australia.

There’s also the obfuscations about obfuscation itself:

Urban Dictionary: Eschew Obfuscation, Espouse Elucidation

“Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the circumscriptional appelations are excised.” (William Mann & Sandra Thompson, Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation, 1987.)

I have been A2A’d this by Alexander Lee, because I posted Nick Nicholas’ answer to Would you post a recording of yourself reciting Sophie Dockx’s Eulogia Hiphopia in Latin?

… let that be my answer to this too. 😛

Lara Novakov and Konstantinos Konstantinides are both right.

The dialects of the Ionian islands have had the longest exposure to Italian (from 1200 through to 1800), and has substantial Italian vocabulary. This performance of Petegola from Corfu (Mardi Gras skits) may exaggerate the intonation as vaudeville, but exaggerated vaudeville is probably the closest you’re going to get nowadays to dialect intonation; and it sounds a little Italian to me:

Why yes, petegola is Venetian, for ‘gossip’.

Of course, nothing sounds more Italian than the Greek actually spoken in Salento and Calabria: it really is Greek as rendered by the Mario Bros.

You’ve got a variety of responses here.

If Obvious Troll Is Trolling, your answer is not going to educate them, the question is likely going to be deleted anyway, and your answer will become inaccessible unless you archive it off to a blog. As many have said, Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer most succinctly.

If you write a good answer anyway, i.e. answer it appropriately: don’t do it for the OP, as Tong Hui Kang’s answer argues. Do it to spread good information. And do it if you think it is really important to spread that information, because the risk that the question is going to be deleted anyway is pretty strong.

Don’t do it to give a withering witty reply back. Not unless it’s Oscar Wilde God Level funny. Countersnark gets boring quickly.

Don’t do it to virtue signal. I don’t care if the term has been appropriated by the Cultural Right, it points to a real phenomenon, there’s way too much of it on Quora, and it is boring. And not particularly informative.

Don’t do it to flame them right back to oblivion. The way BNBR works, you’ll be the one ending up in oblivion.

And lastly and most difficult of all: Do not assume by default that everyone who disagrees with your worldview is an Obvious Troll Trolling. Stating that assumption in an answer is, in fact, a BNBR offence. (I’m sure Jennifer Edeburn has the reference for that somewhere.) Hanlon’s razor applies to Quora questions, just as it does to Quora UX.

Between them, Christopher Ray Miller’s answer and Brian Collins’ answer have most of it covered. There’s one more way to look at it though.

French dropped /s/ at the start of consonant clusters, at the start and in the middle of words. So /sp/ > /p/, /sn/ > /n/, /st/ > /t/ etc: hospital > hôpital, Rhodanus > *Rhodne > *Rhosne > Rhône, establir > établir.

The motivation for this in phonotactics is to reduce the complexity of syllable structures, which make syllables easier to pronounce. It is linguistically common for /s/ to drop off at the start of clusters like that. Dennis Rhodes’ answer notices a similar process going on in some dialects of Spanish (Cuba, Puerto Rico): español ends up pronounced as etpañol, which is on the way to epañol. In my favourite language, Tsakonian, /s/ followed by a consonant is replaced by the aspirated consonant: stoma > tʰuma, sporos > pʰore.

A question also posed at Is there a word for answering a question with a question?, over at Stack Exchange.

Maieutics and the Socratic method are not it. That’s Socrates’ use of questions to encourage someone to rethink their premises; Socrates wasn’t ELIZA.

The answer with a long list of rhetorical figures, posed in the form of a bunch of questions, is inaccurate too: those rhetorical figures cited are just questions, as you can check at https://rhetfig.appspot.com/list.

The only reputable-looking answer is counterquestion, which is on Wiktionary (counterquestion – Wiktionary), and in the OED, dating from 1864:

It’s only correct that Orthodoxy kept the Greek alphabet alive; scripts in the Ottoman Empire were associated with creed. Thus, according to the creed of the Greek speaker, Greek was written in

• Greek script (Orthodox),
• Latin script (Catholic: the Franco-Levantines, including many works of the Cretan Renaissance, and in the Aegean sponsored by Jesuit schools),
• Hebrew (Jews: the Judaeo-Greek Pentateuch of 1547, and some other songs and religious texts in Judaeo-Greek), and
• Arabic (Aljamiado literature, written by and for Muslim Greeks).

Just as Turkish was written in Greek script for Turkish-speaking Christians (Karamanlides). There would be no Aljamiado literature, of course, if Greek Muslims didn’t want to write and read in Greek.

Aljamiado literature (a term borrowed from its Spanish counterpart) has been ignored by Greek scholars until recently. A 2014 lecture on the literature is available at Τουρκογιαννιώτικα στιχοπλάκια και τουρκοκρητικές μαντινάδες: Η ελληνική aljamiado γραμματεία (inaudible Turkish and Greek, with audible but halting simultaneous translation into English).

EDIT: Btw, the notion you will occasionally hear in Greece, that the Greek church somehow preserved Greek is actually bundled up in the notion that the Greek church preserved Greek identity and Greek learning during Ottoman Rule. The Rum Millet, you can argue, did in fact do so; but that was not a Greek idea, but Mehmed II’s. (Dimitris Almyrantis, I’m fishing for an answer from you here.)

Pi approximation day?

By almost remembering it. Just two days off…