I’m a bloke. I don’t want to be told I’m not a bloke, and I’ll be rather surprised if someone thinks I’m not a bloke.
I present as a bloke. I’m quite happy to present as a bloke, and despite the occasional “no, I’m secure in my sexuality” joke, I haven’t particularly delved into gender ambiguity.
I have identities that are more pressing and conscious to me than masculinity; then again, masculinity is the kind of identity that fades into the all-encompassing background readily.
Like Kimberly Alexander’s answer says, cis people don’t particularly reflect on gender the way trans people are forced to. Ditto any privileged identity group: the privilege is in not being Othered.
(That’s why I call you Westerners beef-eaters on Quora all the time.)
Material drawn from forum thread ΙΝΔΙΚΑ ΚΑΙ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙΑ. There is a book on the influx of Bollywood tunes into Greek music:
Ινδοπρεπών αποκάλυψη. Manuel Tasoulas & Eleni Ambatzi. 1998. Ινδοπρεπών αποκάλυψη [Revelation of the Indian-styled]. Athens; Περιβολάκι, Ατραπός.
Bollywood productions were very popular in Greece in the 1960s; my mother remembers watching them as a teenager. Greek music also has some resemblance with the kinds of music featured in Bollywood productions, via the family resemblance chain Greek–Turkish–Persian, Arabic–Indian.
As a result, the 1960s saw a substantial number of Bollywood songs repurposed as Greek hit songs. Not particularly obscure songs either: they include some of the most memorable songs of the 60s. Λίγο-λίγο θα με συνηθίσεις. Καρδιά μου καημένη. Αυτή η νύχτα μένει. Όσο αξίζεις εσύ. Είσαι η ζωή μου.
That trend appears to have dried up since the 60s. Popular Greek music does now occasionally borrow songs from the Arab world; e.g. Katy Garbi’s 1996 hit Περασμένα ξεχασμένα, which is a cover of Hisham Abbas’ Wana Wana Amil Eih.
Αυτό που κάνει εντύπωση είναι πόσο το ύφος άλλαξε όταν μεταφυτεύτηκαν αυτά τα ινδικά λουλούδια στο ελληνικό χώμα!
It’s impressive how much their style changed when these Indian flowers were transplanted to Greek soil.
Two CDs have circulated, Ο γυρισμός της Μαντουμπάλα “The return of Madhubala” and Το τραγούδι της Ναργκίς “The song of Nargis”, pairing 30 Indian originals and their Greek covers. Here’s the six Greek songs I recognise by title. I’m interested to read what readers make of the contrast.
DUNIA ME HAM AAYE HAIN: MOTHER INDIA, 1957. Naushad / Miina & Usha Mangeshkar.
Είσαι η ζωή μου / Στ. Καζαντζίδης / 1959 / Στ. Καζαντζίδης – Μαρινέλλα
AAJAO TARAPT HAI ARMAN: AWAARA, 1951. Sankar – Jaikishan / Lata Mangeshkar
Μαντουμπάλα, 1959 / Η επιστροφή της Μαντουμπάλα, 1964 / Ήρθα πάλι κοντά σου, 1959 / Στ. Καζαντζίδης / Στ. Καζαντζίδης – Μαρινέλλα
You’ll notice that half of these were sung by Stelios Kazantzidis. I used to snob off Kazantzidis when I was a kid, and I’m sure a lot of his contemporaries snobbed him off too, for picking Indo-Gypsy songs (ινδογύφτικα, as Tsitsanis maliciously called them).* It takes time for an outsider to get what he speaks to in the Greek soul. It takes maturity to recognise that those Indo-Gypsy songs resonate deeply with the Greek soul for good reason.
It’s just the icing on the cake that the Greek songs and the Indian originals repeatedly share the Arabic word دنيا (dunya), ‘world’, and its connotations of it being in opposition to Heaven.
* All the more maliciously, because Manolis Angelopoulos, who sang #4, was Roma. And of course of the two names the Roma were traditionally given in Greek, tsinganos and ɣiftos, ɣiftos is the more negative. In fact, rendering ινδογύφτικα as “Indo-nigger songs” would not be that inaccurate.
Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream! My spirit not awakening, till the beam Of an Eternity should bring the morrow. Yes! tho’ that long dream were of hopeless sorrow, ’Twere better than the cold reality Of waking life, to him whose heart must be, And hath been still, upon the lovely earth, A chaos of deep passion, from his birth.
I make of it something different than you make of it, Magister. I make of it the bitter refrain of the middle-aged, in song and in lyric: that the vigour and felicity of youth are not cherished when we’re in the midst of them, and are lamented by us when they’re gone. The wish that the grudging disappointments of middle age, and the aches of senectitude, could be effaced; that we could transition directly from youth to the hereafter, without the gift of youth being tarnished within our very frames.
“Hope I die before I get old”—How old’s the guy who sang that now? 72?
And clicking through to the question details that the shmucks here in Quora Product Design still permit us—Dreams: yes. The imagined, the fleed-to, the dreamed, the recollection with rose-coloured glasses, is always better than what we live in cold reality. In fact—and you and I both know this, mi senex—the youth that was once cold reality was no match for the youth of middle-aged dreams. I didn’t enjoy being young. I didn’t get to have much fun, and I thought my long dream was of hopeless sorrow at the time—because I knew no true sorrow. I didn’t enjoy my vigour, because I knew no decrepitude. I didn’t think things lovely, because I knew no ugliness.
We Greeks, we have a saying for that too. Κάθε πέρσι και καλύτερα. Each “last year” is better than the next.
I recognise the sentiment, mi senex. I recognise that sentiment which colours all of what I do. My last year was better than this too, for having had your voice in it.
(And for having had question details.)
And yet, that’s easy. It’s easy to regret what’s gone; it’s hard to rejoice in what follows. It’s easy to regret vigour; it’s hard to rejoice in wisdom. It’s easy to lament in friends gone; it’s hard to rejoice in friends gained.
It’s easy to have missed your voice. It’s hard to know that mine, too, is a voice that will one day be missed.
Zhou Enlai was old too, in 1972. Alice Goodman, on the other hand, was just 29 when she put these words in his mouth. But she knew what words she did put in his mouth:
I am old and I cannot sleep forever, like the young, nor hope that death will be a novelty but endless wakefulness when I put down my work and go to bed. How much of what we did was good? Everything seems to move beyond our remedy. Come, heal this wound. At this hour nothing can be done. Just before dawn the birds begin, the warblers who prefer the dark, the cage-birds answering. To work! Outside this room the chill of grace lies heavy on the morning grass.
It now does not work, although the prompts are pretending that it does work.
Somehow, I think this reflects the inner workings of Quora UX’s Story Thought. Or whatever else the Quora Design team write on Quora, when they’re not introducing new and bold functionality into their product.
When someone submits a post to your blog, and they’re not an Author, you’re allowed to reject it.
Courtesy dictates that, if you do, you say why.
And the UI indicates so, too:
I’ve done so before.
This past few weeks, I’ve clicked “optional explanation”. Nothing happens; the hyperlink is to the page you’re already on. I’ve clicked Ignore Submission: no popup to say why, like there used to be, and certainly no notification to the author that you’ve rejected their submission.
Yes, I have reported this as a bug, two weeks ago. For all the good that seems to do.
No, I can’t show you a ticket number to confirm that. Because Quora.
But maybe I’m just not imaginative enough. Maybe this is actually a Feature.
A feature to illustrate the futility of all things in this Vale of Tears, perhaps, including blog submissions.
Or, maybe, I’m being trapped in Story Thinking, of how I just want to reject a blog submission politely, and Quora Design is trying to nudge me into System Thinking (i.e. seeing the big picture), that blogs are a deprecated part of the Quora Experience, and everyone should just stick to Q&A.
And then again, maybe regression testing is just another thing that gets in the way of Quora Design DEPLOYING EVERYTHING ON THEIR DRIVE TO PRODUCTION IN 8 MINUTES!!!!!111!!11!!!!!eleven!!!
You want your favorite consumer technology companies taking risks and making big changes! This is how things get better.
Indeed.
That kind of snide remark is also how Scott Welch gets blocked by everyone at Quora, for that matter. (I’ve already been blocked by one staff member, yay me.) But, as the Greek proverb goes—
—all together now, you’ve heard me say it often enough:
Θέλω ν’ αγιάσω μα δε μ’ αφήνουν. I’m trying to be a saint, but they won’t let me!
If you’re being brought up to speak Esperanto or Klingon or Lojban or (in the case of Itamar Ben-Avi) Revived Hebrew [yes, I’m calling Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s work a made up language], the main issue you’d run into is not having anyone but your parents, and maybe occasionally your parents’ weirdo friends, to use the language with.
That is actually a very common dealbreaker for kids with Esperanto, and the parents end up acquiescing; there may be 10k denaskaj Esperantistoj (native speakers of Esperanto) that are still engaged with the language, but there are a lot more that aren’t. This got addressed in the surveys behind Peter Forster’s book The Esperanto Movement. I haven’t asked him personally, but I think it’s a big reason why Alec Speers gave up and D’Armond Speers acquiesced, with Klingon. Itamar, unfortunately, was not given the option, which is why he could only talk to his dog as a kid.
(I know someone bringing up his kid to speak Lojban, and my Facebook feed has intermittent reports of how it’s going; but I haven’t been following it. Lojban is certainly going to be a lot more alien than Klingon.)
A second issue, which I’ve heard for Esperanto and which D’Armond certainly reported for Klingon, was the lack of vocabulary that you can use with a kid around the house. It’s not necessarily that Esperanto lacks such vocabulary, but that Esperantists usually don’t learn that vocabulary, because that’s not the context in which they use the language. Just as people who learn foreign languages formally usually don’t end up learning the word for armpit. So you may grow up with circumlocutions or ad hoc words.
Chomskyans may mutter darkly that if you are brought up to speak a made up language, that will warp your language acquisition FOREVAH, and that bringing up a kid to speak Klingon is somehow child abuse. I even heard that from non-Chomskyans.
Poppycock. Kids survived being brought up in slave plantations creolising their parents’ pidgins without sustaining brain damage; the brain is a flexible thing, far more flexible than knob-twiddling universal parameters gives it credit for; and in any case, no kid is being brought up with no exposure ever to natural languages in parallel. (Not even Itamar. Poor kid.)
I have found out that the Iliad means ‘The thing about the lion’ and I was just wondering how one would say, ‘The thing about the eagle’.
No. No it doesn’t, and you need to slap whoever told you that in the face. Iliad means ‘The thing about Ilium’, where Ilium was an alternate name of Troy. ‘The thing about the lion’ would be Leontiad, Λεοντιάς, -άδος, ἡ.
And ‘the thing about the eagle’ would accordingly be Aeëtiad or Aëtiad, Αἰετιάς/ Ἀετιάς, -άδος, ἡ.
I’m sceptical to what extent mathematics enters into any reasoning about human language (and Lojbanists actually highlight that language is not reducible to truth-conditional logic). But much of what you’re saying is the bet behind Natural semantic metalanguage, which tries to define every concept ever in a language that looks like English, but that has only an extremely small number of primitive words.
NSM was a thing of cruel, adamantine beauty back in the 70s and 80s, when it had just 14 primitives. It was also of course utterly unusable as a practical tool for eliciting meaning. It’s now up to 63.
A favourite party trick of Anna Wierzbicka’s undergrads, at least in my day, was to try to hold conversations in NSM. It can be done. It can’t be done efficiently enough to count as a real conversation; but it does meet a generous definition of “in real time”.
I knew linguists that had worked with long-rangers (those who propose wide-ranging linguistic affiliations); I have in fact met the late Sergei Starostin, proofread contributions by John Bengtson, and read issues of Mother Tongue (journal). I even have a quote from Mother Tongue as one of my .sigs, though not approvingly:
“Assuming, for whatever reasons, that neither scholar presented the evidence properly, then there remains a body of evidence you have not yet destroyed because it has never been presented.” — Harold Fleming
Spot the logical fallacy. The quote actually was trying to defend a link between Basque and Caucasian languages, which is part of the Dené–Caucasian hypothesis.
The validity of the rest of the family, however, is controversial or viewed as doubtful by most historical linguists.
Dené–Yeniseian languages is new to me (of course, since I was reading long-range reconstructions in the 1990s), and I’ll come back to it.
The majority opinion in historical linguistics is to mistrust long-range linguistic families, because the number of correspondences those families are based on is increasingly tenuous, and the amount of noise introduced by the great chronological distance overwhelms the signal of possible links.
When long-range reconstruction tries to use the traditional methodology that gave us Indo-European, as with Nostratic languages (trying to find commonality between Indo-European and its neighbours), the majority opinion is sometimes polite, but almost always unconvinced. Particularly when those families are instead based on eyeballing, the majority opinion simply does not want to know.
Long-range advocates defend eyeballing by the fact that Joseph Greenberg used eyeballing to work out the linguistic history of Africa. But his proposals only can get confirmed by detailed comparative work (just as the periodic table needed to wait on subatomic particles for its workings to be understood); and unsurprisingly the linguists who are sceptical about long-range comparison in general, such as Lyle Campbell, are sceptical about his work on Africa too.
When it comes to American Indian languages, we have poor historical records, and congenitally cautious historical linguists (such as Campbell) combining to refuse to reduce the number of American Indian language families below 150. Now, obviously, there weren’t 150 different waves of migration across the Bering Strait: those language families are quite likely all related. Greenberg thought they are almost all related as Amerind, again by eyeballing. But most Amerindianists don’t see enough convincing data there to call Amerind a family.
There are two indigenous language families in the Americas that Greenberg did not think could be lumped in as Amerind: Eskimo–Aleut languages, and Na-Dené languages. The best known languages of Na-Dene are Apache and Navajo; but the bulk of the Na-Dené languages are spoken in Western Canada and Alaska:
And Na-Dené may (may) reflect a distinct wave of migration into America: Settlement of the Americas – Wikipedia says “The interior route is consistent with the spread of the Na Dene language group and Subhaplogroup X2a into the Americas after the earliest paleoamerican migration.”
And if the Na-Dené are a distinct, later wave of migration, then we might (might) be able to find related languages on the other side of the Bering Strait.
The linguists behind Dené-Caucasian are Russians of the Nostratic school, not Americans of the eyeballing school. But it’s a big family: it includes North-Eastern Caucasian (of which Chechen is the language you’re likeliest to have heard of), Sino-Tibetan (which includes Chinese), Burushaski (an isolate in Pakistan which lots of linguists would like to connect to something), Yeniseian (a language family in central Siberia), and, alas, Basque, which everyone wants to try to connect to something.
There’s extensive discussion of the pros and cons to Dené-Caucasian over at Wikipedia. The proposal, like Nostratic, does try to do things by the book, which is laudable. But it relies on comparing proto-languages, which are themselves reconstructions; and that is risky business, given how uncertain the reconstructions are; if you switch reconstructions (e.g. the reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan or North Caucasian), it falls apart. And given the ginormous number of consonants in Caucasian, any reconstruction of North-Eastern Caucasian is going to be fragile.
The news to me was that the more recent proposal of Dené-Yeniseian, lining Na-Dene to the Yeniseian languages in central Siberia, has not been shouted down:
It helps rhetorically that its proponent Edward Vajda has dismissed an earlier eyeballing-based proposal of Dené-Yeniseian as based on coincidence. I hate to say it, but it may also have helped that he’s American and not Russian. But a lot of Western linguists have lined up since to say that his proposal sounds plausible—a lot more than have ever said anything nice about Nostratic. (Lyle Campbell of course has continued to do his Lyle Campbell thing and be sceptical.)
And if you’re going to link Na-Dené with a group of languages the other side of the Bering Strait, Yeniseian looks somehow… safer than Yeniseian + Sino-Tibetan + Northeastern Caucasian + Burushaski + Basque.
This is an incendiary and attention-seeking claim, with an eensy-weensy tiny kernel of truth to it.
The refugees from Turkey after 1922 (and that’s not just Pontic Greeks, but Western Asia Minor Greeks and Cappadocian Greeks too) were dispossessed and impoverished. They gravitated to the left and the Communist Party.
As a lot of dispossessed and impoverished people tend to do.
If some of them adopted communism so fervently as to become spies for the KGB, that would be plausible—but for the fact that the KGB was not called the KGB until 1954, by which time the Greek Communist Party leadership had been exiled to Tashkent, and the Communist Party driven underground. Would the Greek Communist Party of the 30s have loyally provided some intelligence to the OGPU, KGB’s predecessor of the time? I guess. And would some of them have been Pontic Greeks? I guess. *shrug*
Which is as polite as I can be about this question.
How happy in his low degree, How rich in humble poverty, is he, Who leads a quiet country life; Discharg’d of business, void of strife,
This almost scans as iambic tetrameter: 8–9 syllables, not 10–11 syllables (which the rest of the poem does, outside its final stanza), and it scans better than OP thought it did:
1. In modern times, qui.et is two syllables, not one, although past spellings reveal that it used to be both. From OED 3rd edition:
2. In modern times, business is two syllables (bɪznəs). To quote OED again:
Disyllabic pronunciation, reflecting syncope of the unstressed second syllable of trisyllabic forms, is indicated by spellings without a medial vowel from the 16th cent. and is noted by orthoepists from the early 17th cent. (see further E. J. Dobson Eng. Pronunc. 1500–1700 (ed. 2, 1968) II. §306).
3. However, poverty is a problem. For this to scan, it would have to be one of:
pov’rty’s he (with pov’rty two syllables, and not <r> acting as its own syllable). But that’s unpronouncable, unless the <v> was actually a /w/. OED provides a pre-17th century spelling powerte, powertie, and pow’rty’s he is slightly more pronounceable;but that was supposed to have been ancient history by Dryden’s time.
povert’s he, with the final -y not pronounced; OED indicated that that did actually occur in places in Middle English and Modern dialect—Middle English has spellings like “ME pouerd, ME pouerert (transmission error), ME pouerte, ME pouertt, ME pouertte, ME povert, ME poverte, ME powaret, ME–15 pouert; Sc. pre-17 powert.” Again, that was supposed to have been ancient history by Dryden’s time.
… There is of course a simpler explanation: that Dryden is allowing himself one initial pentameter, before ploughing on in tetrameters; just as he puts a couple of trimeters at the very end of the poem—
This Morecraft said within himself, Resolved to leave the wicked town, And live retired upon his own. He called his money in; But the prevailing love of pelf Soon split him on the former shelf, And put it out again.
I don’t know enough about English verse to know whether such licence was commonplace at the start of long poems.
