Author: admin

I am delighted to be A2A’d this question.

There has been long-running, nationalistically driven, and tedious argument about how old the Greek dialects spoken in Southern Italy are, with to and fro from Italian linguists and Greek linguists, and with the great Romanist Gerhard Rohlfs kinda weighing in on the Greek side.

There is a significant difference between the Griko of Calabria, and the Griko of Salento. The Griko of Calabria, which is moribund, is much more obviously archaic: it has many more fossilised bits of Ancient Greek which only make sense if it was continuously spoken in place. The Calabrian Mafia’s heartland is in Greek-speaking territory, and its name, ‘Ndrangheta, sounds like something straight out of Sparta: Andragathia, “Manly Virtue”.

Salentino Griko, on the other hand, which is much healthier, is closer to Modern Greek both grammatically and lexically. My own pet theory is that Calabrian Greek is a continuation of Magna Graecia, while Salentine Greek reflects resettlement from Greece in Byzantine times. I’m not seeing much to refute that.

As for differences: if you picture Shakespearean English spoken in a Vaudeville Italian accent, you’ll be reasonably close.

• Salentine Greek, at least, is just about mutually intelligible, though with a fair bit of difficulty.
• A lot of the difficulty will be around the massive amount of vocabulary taken from Italian (and Calabrian/Salentino dialect)
• Some of the difficulty will also be because Griko has become aligned to Italian phonotactics. No final -s anywhere. In most villages, no consonants alien to the Romance dialects: [θ, x, ɣ, ð] gone. Clusters alien to the Romance dialects gone: [ks] > [ts], for instance. Geminates all over the place (like in Cypriot, but unlike all other dialects of Modern Greek), and in fact the characteristic /ll/ > /ɖɖ/ of the Romance dialects.
• The grammar is certainly archaic: the infinitive survives to a similar extent with Mediaeval Greek, after modals (telo pai ‘I want to go’ instead of θelo na pao ‘I want that I should go’). Participles are much more used as well.

Let me try out a parallel text. The Salentine lament on migration “My Man’s Gone Away” (Andra mu pai) was a hit in Greece in the 70s—which means it was mutually intelligible enough. To try and explain what’s going on, I’ll italicise the Italian words (which in fact Italian linguists routinely do), and I’ll boldface words that Greeks won’t recognise as too archaic. I’ll then give a calque into pseudo-Modern Greek (and bracketted Italian), so you can see the differences.

Klama (Andramu pai)

Telo na mbriakeftò.. na mi’ ppensefso,
na klafso ce na jelaso telo artevrài;
ma mali rràggia evò e’ nna kantaliso,
sto fengo e’ nna fonaso: o andramu pai!

θelo na meθiso (ubriacare), na mi skeftome (pensare)
na klapso ke na ɣelaso θelo tora to vraði
me meɣali orɣi (rabbia) eɣo θe na traɣuðiso (cantare)
sto feŋɡari θe na fonakso o andras mu pai.

I want to get drunk, not to think,
to cry and laugh is what I want tonight.
I will sing with great rage
I will shout to the moon: my husband is gone!

Fsunnìsete, fsunnìsete, jinèke!
Dellàste ettù na klàfsete ma mena!
Mìnamo manechè-mma, diàike o A’ Vrizie
Ce e antròpi ste‘ mas pane ess‘ena ss’ena!

ksipnisete, ksipnisete, ɣinekes!
elate eðo na klapsete me mena!
miname monaxes mas, ðiavike o ai vritsios
ke i anθropi stekun mas pane eks ena se ena

Wake up, wake up, women!
Come here and cry with me!
We have been left alone, the feast of St Britius has passed
And our men are leaving, one by one.

E antròpi ste‘ mas pane, ste’ ttaràssune!
N’arti kalì ‘us torùme ettù s’ena chrono!
è’ tui e zoì-mma? è’ tui e zoì, Kristè-mu?
Mas pa’ ‘cì sti Germania klèonta ma pono!

i anθropi stekun mas pane, stekun tarasune
na arti kali tus θorume eðo se ena xrono.
ine tuti i zoi mas, ine tuti i zoi, xriste mu?
mas pane eki sti ɣermania kleondas me pono

Our men are leaving on us, they’re going.
If things go well, we will see them back here in a year.
Is this our life? Is this a life, Christ?
They are going over there to Germany, crying with pain.

Vote #1 Christopher Kowalewski: That’s the working through of internal reconstruction that you only see the results of in the textbooks.

Now, Chad Turner suggests I’d know the answer. God, *I* don’t know the answer. But Sihler does: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Or at least, Sihler knows as much of the answer as there is to be known.

§531. Other tense and mood stems of the Latin perfect system are all based upon a combination of the Latin perfect stem, whichever that happens to be, with an element *-is-, of wholly obscure origin but most commonly imagined to be related somehow to the s-aorist. […]

1. Pluperfect Indicative. Functionally the past of the perfect, in effect, like New English had gone. Latin -eram, -erās, -erat from *-is- together with *-ā-, the optative formation which functions as an anterior tense marker in -bā- and erā- ‘was’. (The vowel of -er- is of course ambiguous per se, but its historical value can be surmised from the pluperfect in *-issē-, 4, below.) […]

3. Perfect Subjunctive. […] So *-is-ī- plus endings, whence by regular sound laws –erim, -erīs, -erit, -erīmus.

4. Pluperfect Subjunctive. Descriptively, the stem in *-is- with an additional element *-sē- of profoundly obscure origin; so *-is-sē-, whence -issem, -issēs, -isset.—The same *-sē- is found in the imperfect subjunctive.

So, to unpack this. If we look at the pluperfect ama-v-eram ‘I had loved’, the pluperfect person inflection (-m) comes from the same place as the person inflection of eram ‘I was’. And the vowel -ā- in -eram comes from the same place as the -ā- of eram. But the -er- in the suffix is not the same stem as the er- in eram. It is a development of proto-Latin *-isām.

And how do we know that the “wholly obscure” *-is- infix is not the same as the stem of esse? Because the -i- still shows up, e.g. in the pluperfect subjunctive. But also because a verb doesn’t get just plunked at the end of a finite verb, †amavi eram. If you have a compound verb in Latin, you expect the auxiliary to be combined with a non-finite verb, like amare habeo > French aimerai.

Add that the perfect –v– is specific to Latin (it’s absent from Sabine: Sihler §528), so it can’t be that old in the language: certainly not old enough that an †amavXXXXX eram could have been lost in the depths of time.

In a small-minded, robotic reading, I can see why this was deemed as not answering the question.

What’s happening in reality of course is that both the question and answer are in poor English (I’m sorry, but they are), so one needs to think a little to understand what is going on. And Quora Moderation does not always display a sympathetic approach to poor English.

The implicit question was: if frying eggs in oil or butter is bad for you, would removing the fatty oils from the process (e.g. filling a frying pan with water instead of oil) be better for you?

That’s not what the question said, but it’s what it seems to have meant. And OP eventually adjusted it to “Oh, you call that poaching in English.”

Your answer is “frying eggs is not bad” (well, depends on bad, because consuming lots of food fried in oil is considered bad for you for a reason), but “frying in water is impossible”.

That doesn’t answer the question, because it rejects that the question even makes sense. There are plenty of answers like that here.

I *think* what’s happened here is that the moderator thought the implicit question did make sense (because it was speaking about the harmfulness of oil, and whether removing oil from the process would make a difference), and that you didn’t address it.

I don’t agree with that call; it is, in any case, speculation. Poor English will prejudice readers, especially if there is some difficulty in recovering the meaning. I will say, though, that I didn’t think your answer particularly ambiguous.

The way I see the world, it is noticeable not to acknowledge someone acting on your A2A. Human beings function that way. Quora may think they are above human sociability (which is why they keep denying that this is also a social site). But Quora users are not.

I don’t obsess about every upvote, but I will certainly notice it if noone upvotes an answer I’ve given—including the A2A’er. And I will read something in to that.

What form should the acknowledgement take? Well, there are multiple forms, and there is widespread confusion about exactly what the Thank button is for (How many of you use Quora’s “Thank” function after reading a good answer? Is sending “Thanks” without upvoting kind of like a backhanded compliment on Quora? What is the difference between sending “Thanks” and agreeing with/upvoting an answer on Quora? These features seem kind of similar.) My own behaviour, like Edward Conway’s, is to reserve Thanks for very good answers.

Thanks for A2A… I think.

From Fecal incontinence – Wikipedia, the closest I’m seeing is fecal leakage. But that doesn’t have the implication of controlled but misconstrued bowel movement that a “shart” has.

Googling is not yielding a more formal term.

Would be nice, wouldn’t it. I’m not aware of one.

Quality of course can’t be gauged automatically, but the request answers popup doesn’t even bother telling you who the Most Viewed Writers are, let alone sort them accordingly.

Oh, but it does show you their bios. Which are now credentials. That should tell you something…

I can confirm Edward Conway’s answer, as I was who he tested it out with.

I was surprised that moderation can not only scrutinise but edit PMs, but Nikki Primrose has just reported the same experience: I received a notification that I’d violated BNBR but the link was to a message in my inbox that I’d never replied to. What is that about? She got Benburred (h/t La Gigi) for receiving an offensive message (?!), but her correspondant got his message removed from her inbox.

My first surmise is that someone reported you, but..

… OP, this was happening while you were typing? That sounds… draconian, and unmanageable. And it certainly doesn’t sound like a reaction to a report. It does sound extraordinary that people’s PMs should be prefiltered, especially for something relatively innocuous.

I don’t know that you can get it back; but an appeal to mods is always worth trying.

Yes, Shashank, I know. 🙂

Was Newspeak inspired by Esperanto?

We know what Orwell was satirising, and why he was annoyed with Esperanto. Don’t worry about it. Orwell was if anything more annoyed with Basic English, and would likely be annoyed with any conlang. (One of the examples he gives in Politics and the English Language is from a text advocating Interglosa.)

Yes, there is an ideology behind Esperanto. It does not actually influence the linguistic materials themselves terribly much. The ideology is benign, as far as those things go (Lanti’s Sennacieco, which Orwell bristled at, was as overt as it ever got), and is not as much in the foreground as it used to be anyway.

The notes of the Ancient Greek musical system were organised into tetrachords, groups of four notes. Two tetrachords made an octave.

The central octave went:

{Hypate, Parhypate, Lichanos, Mese}, {Paramese, Trite, Paranete, Nete}

It gets rather more complicated than that; the paramese, for example, is an interstitial note, and the tetrachords keep going above and below the central octave. See Musical system of ancient Greece – Wikipedia

A front runner would have to be AKEL, the Cypriot Communist party, which has a history of support in both communities. In fact Turkish Cypriots felt particularly betrayed when AKEL eventually came out against the Annan plan.