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Because, for better or worse, Sports in Australia has contributed to Australians’ sense of who they are. And it has done so since easily the 1870s.

For the answer to why that has happened: See How has sport shaped Australia’s national identity?

Mariam Als, thank you for your A2As. I truly am not qualified to answer this, and I hope Dimitris Almyrantis will. Irene Avetyan, I’m looking at you too. This is more to provoke an answer out of them, and it’s not rooted in any great understanding of Ottoman or Turkish history.

(That, and I’m cleaning out my A2A queue today.)

There are various forces historically that give cohesion to States. We have seen a change in the relative strength of those forces in the last couple of centuries; and that has undermined both Ottomanism and Pan-Islamism, in favour of Nationalism.

I’m not familiar with the term Ottomanism, but I’ll assume it’s the whole notion of a multi-ethnic empire, with a dominant ethnicity and/or religion and/or culture. Europe was doing the same thing with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the Ottoman Empire collapsed for the same reason as the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Nationalism was a more compelling cause for the non-dominant peoples within the empire.

I recently had an exchange with Erdi Küçük about footage of Greek POWs discussing their encounter with Atatürk.

https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Peg…

Greek with Turkish subtitles, no English unfortunately. The gist is, Atatürk had won, and had done away with the Ottoman Empire in the process; but he was still complaining to the Greek POWs of how disloyal they had been to the Empire, and how the Empire had indulged their theatrical performances of Greek nationalist plays with no recrimination. (“The stage was white with kilts and swords!”)

Erdi said something that blew me away with how perceptive it was:

You sort of realize that at that point, he’s still a bitter Ottoman officer who couldn’t get over the fact that empire is gone (and his viewpoint is exactly the reason why it’s gone), and he’s unhappy even at victory.

Atatürk’s viewpoint was still Ottomanist. It could not cope with the Greeks’ Nationalism.

Nationalism, admittedly, has been a poor fit for the Arabic-Speaking world. But it’s worked a treat for Turkey, which has embraced it whole-heartedly (even if it is launching its own Pan-Turkic system of alliances now). And, in a way I haven’t quite worked out, nationalism (or at least, a Shi’a-centric focus) has worked fine for Iran too.

If Ottomanism was frustrated by European Nationalism, Pan-Islamism failed even earlier: the Ummah had already stopped paying attention to a single caliph when the Fatimids and the Ummayads set up their own caliphates in the tenth century: Caliphate. Pan-Islamism was frustrated by the emergence of rival centres of power within the Arabic speaking Sunni world, long before the Turks were part of the picture: Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, Fez, Cordoba; and there was no possibility that India, let alone Indonesia, would ever be yoked into the same political entity as the Arabs.

Any notion of Pan-Islamism is anachronistic; the Rashidun (the first caliphate of Islam) is not coming back, and the Rashidun was never going to stay united with it covering the amount of ground it did so quickly. The Ottoman Sultan was the nominal caliph; but I just can’t buy it that the Sultan’s caliphate meant all that much in terms of keeping the empire together. It didn’t make Morocco or Iran rush to join up.

I’ll second Spyros Theodoritsis. Yes, Greek Cypriots killed Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus in intercommunity violence. Yes, there was de facto partition of the island since 1963. Yes, if you talk to at least some Greek Cypriots for long enough (as I did with my uncle there), you’ll work out that despite their professed desire for a reunified Cyprus (as long as the mainland Turks go away), they don’t necessarily have a lot of respect for Turkish Cypriots.

But no, making Cyprus Türkenrein has never been a talking point for Greek Cypriots. They do want their homes back, as you’ve clarified the question, OP, but they do actually want reunification and peace as well. I don’t think they’d trust any population exchange solution to resolve anything anyway: it’s a cause of Turkish resentment just waiting to happen.

Although it has to be said, the newer generation of Greek Cypriots has gotten quite used to living with partition; and reunification is no longer for Greek Cypriots an existential question, the way it has been for Turkish Cypriots.

Contra Loretta B DeLoggio, I am not more mature and patient than a high school student. 🙂

Quora’s server being down goes into the same box for me as Quora’s UI stuffing up, or Quora losing my comment because of its bizarre insistence on connectivity and refreshing, or Quora losing days’ worth of stats, any number of glitches that somehow do not seem to plague other comparable sites I use.

I growl “Fricking Quora”, I hit refresh a couple of times, and then I find something else to do for the next hour. Which in fact is what Loretta does too!

I read Geoffrey Blainey: A Shorter History of Australia by Nick Nicholas on Aphypnēsis Amichaiou , which actually posed this question. And if I hadn’t left the book in the hotel… well, I still wouldn’t look it up.

But in brief:

• Australians defined themselves early on (like, 1820s) against the British, for being more fit and active, in their new country.
• Australians had a lot more leisure time than Dickensian Britons did; remember that the eight-hour day was pioneered in Australia in the 1850s. So sporting fixtures became a prominent part of the community already at that time: not just racecourses, satisfying their need for gambling, but also sports ovals, satisfying their need to watch sport and participate in sport.
• That participation thing is key: sport establishes itself more readily as part of your identity if you and most people you know actually play one.
• Sport gave a very early opportunity for Australians to assert a distinct identity against Britain, and even to beat Britain at its own game (particularly at cricket).
• Once those elements were in place, they just kept going. After cricket as an international spectator sport, athletics and tennis. Cricket and the football codes, as both participatory and spectator sports. The football codes as a new tribalism (something familiar elsewhere of course). The Ashes, rugby, tennis, the Olympics, the Empire and then Commonwealth games, as ways Australia gained international prominence.

Wow. 2015 MacBook Pro.

Safari open with 11 windows, 73 tabs.

9 Windows in Finder. I tend to leave search windows open.

12 Terminal windows. I only need 4 at a given programming task.

16 tabs in my BBEdit text editor. I only need one or two.

iCal.

System settings.

Wunderlist.

Mac Mail, with 5 emails open.

I’m on vacation. There’s normally also two or three Microsoft Office documents, at least one Excel Spreadsheet, often one or two Powerpoints, iTunes, Slack, Skype, and maybe the Eclipse programming environment.

I know you want to know about the tabs open while on Quora in particular. I’ll have multiple tabs open with notifications (because I keep forgetting, and because notifications is how I navigate what to do), answer requests (which this was one of), a couple of Wikipedia pages to help with answers, half a dozen answers I should get around to reading or commenting on. When I don’t have as big an A2A backlog, and at least one instance of a Quora feed.

If I end up opening a new window for Quora because of tab overload, the “I’ll get around to them” tabs end up forgotten in the old window.

Homo significans, “human who makes meaning”, is already a well established expression. So is homo interpres, “interpreting human”, human who makes sense of things.

You’re doing something more subtle: “seeking meaning in the universe, anticipating that there will be meaning”. It’s very close to homo interpres. But if you want to be more explicit: homo signa quaerens, or homo significationem quaerens.

No single word for “meaning-seeking”. You asked for Latin, not Greek.

Because Quora writers know what they’re doing.

Of course, rank beginners don’t know what they’re doing. Partly because Quora has never onboarded well, but it is a reasonable and laudable requirement of the community, that a question with explanation and illustration is more useful (and frankly much more fun to write), than a one-liner I could have found on Google. As indeed McKayla Kennedy said in her answer.

But Quora can’t read writers’ minds. If only there were some sort of probation mechanism, whereby Quora would stop collapsing short answers, once writers had established their bona fides as experienced writers…

… which of course, is exactly what happens. See How long has it been since a bot has collapsed one of your answers for shortness (Sept 2016)?

There’s a lot about Quora UX I think is stupid, but this isn’t one of them.

Vote #1 Michael Minnich: Michael Minnich’s answer to Linguistically speaking, why is the relationship between the signifier and signified mostly arbitrary? It brings up several pertinent reasons.

My answer’s simpler: restricting ourselves to lexicon, non-arbitrary signifier–signified relations in a spoken language are going to be limited to referents that make a sound. Most verbs and adjectives and abstract nouns defy onomatopoeia. Even with concrete nouns, what’s the onomatopoeia for “hair”? “sun”? “fish”?

Even if we broaden things to include indexical signs and sound symbolism, there are real limits to how much can be signified by a non-arbitrtary signifier in a sound-based language. The limits will be enough to prevent you having a real communicative language—even if you don’t move up from lexicon to syntax.

As Katherine Rossiter said: you appeal.

I got dinged once for Spamming. After appealing, I got the question restored after a few days.

But critically, I amended the answer to make sure it was not seen to be spamming: I removed all the hyperlinking which had triggered the Spambot (and which were not essential to the question). You too, OP, should look at the question critically, and remove anything that looks like it would trigger the Spambot. The Spambot is there for a reason. And in your appeal, explain how you edited the answer to comply.