Author: admin

Complimentary, but not deep.

The interwebs widely quote Chomsky saying in Kolkata, in a 10-minute speech in 2001, “The first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini’s grammar”: An event in Kolkata. Chomsky in fact already said that in the preface of Aspects in 1965: “a generative grammar, in essentially the contemporary sense of this term” . And the final line of The Sound Pattern of English is an allusion to the final sutra of Panini, “ā → ā”.

But as Kiparsky and Staal noted in 1969, Panini’s model of generativity has very different constructs between the two levels: they are derivations, not rewritings. An anecdote on Chomsky’s linguistic theory suggests that Chomsky ended up going back to an approach more like Panini’s with Minimalism in 1991—and might have saved himself 26 years if he’d read Panini more closely when he was citing him in Aspects.

But of course, Chomsky wasn’t learning from Panini, or honing his craft against the Indian master. Chomsky came up with transformations on his own, and merely found it convenient occasionally to allude to Panini as an antecedent. Panini and Chomsky were not undertaking the same research programme, after all.

Khateeb, I have no idea, but I can surmise based on:

• The Death of the Urdu Script – ali eteraz – Medium
• Nastaʿlīq script – Wikipedia

If your technology is handwriting, it doesn’t particularly matter whether your writing is vertical or horizontal, or a mix of both.

If you’re writing online in 2017, and you want to use a vertical script like Mongolian… well, read Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why doesn’t Mongolia use the Uighur script again and leave out Cyrillic?

And Nastaliq goes both vertical and horizontal. If you read the Wikipedia page, metallic, traditional typesetting of Nastaliq has been a non-starter for that reason. Digital typesetting in theory should be easier, but of course in practice it is a hassle, especially if you can just use Naskh as an alternative.

Wikipedia says that the InPage custom Desktop Publishing software, which exists to do Nastaliq, is extensively used now for Urdu. For publishing, maybe; the Medium blog above shows how little penetration Nastaliq has had among laypeople online, and how grateful they were that Microsoft started supporting Nastaliq at all in 2011.

Khateeb, you’ll have to tell me how widely Nastaliq is seen in Urdu. You asked though about Persian. If I interpret Wikipedia correctly, while Nastaliq originated in Persia, its use in Persian is limited to poetry; Pashto uses both Naskh and Nastaliq, and Kashmiri, Punjabi and Urdu—and Ottoman Turkish—used Nastaliq. For whatever reason, it seems that Nastaliq flourished as an everyday script, rather than a calligraphy-only script, only east of Persia. Possibly because Persia neighbours Naskh territory (Arabic), and Urdu neighbours Persian, not Arabic.

So, if I had to guess why Persian sticks with Naskh: combination of technical difficulties, and not a strong enough identification with Nastaliq to bother surmounting the technical difficulties (unlike Urdu).

The Wikimedia Language committee clamped down on “dead” languages and artificial languages quite ferociously, after an initial laissez-faire period. Because initially you could set up a Wikipedia in any language you liked, Latin, Old English, Gothic, and Old Church Slavonic got in. Because the Wikimedia Language Committee clamped down, Ancient Greek got rejected even though the proposal for it was far advanced.

Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Ancient Greek

This discussion was created before the implementation of the Language proposal policy, and it is incompatible with the policy. Please open a new proposal in the format this page has been converted to (see the instructions). Do not copy discussion wholesale, although you are free to link to it or summarise it (feel free to copy your own comments over). — {admin} Pathoschild 20:12, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Same goes for Ido and Volapük and Lojban, which got in before (Esperanto would be hard to argue against), and Toki Pona or Klingon, which didn’t make it. Klingon being a pop culture conlang, it attracted disproporionate negative attention, including Wales personally wielding the axe against it:

History of the Klingon Wikipedia

In August 2005, Jimbo Wales made a decision to lock the Klingon Wiki permanently. While Jimbo has never publicly stated his exact rationale for closing the wiki, the maturation of Wikipedia and its sister projects as a whole into a vital worldwide resource meant that there was little incentive to keep a niche language that was not intended to be seriously used. Other constructed languages such as the Toki Pona language were closed at about the same time (although the Toki Pona Wikipedia, like the Klingon Wikipedia, was ultimately hosted at Wikia due to the presence of a strong community).

In fact, the Klingon letter r was removed from the Wikipedia logo in 2010, replaced by a Ge’ez character.

Old logo; Klingon <r> top right.

New logo

I sat through the 1992 revival of Einstein on the Beach, which goes for five hours, and which is much more static (as hardcore minimalist music) than a symphony would be. I had no problem sitting through the entire thing—even though the opera creators imagined you could walk in and out as you pleased. And I was proud to give them a standing ovation at the end of it.

(The audience was much more restless in the 1992 revival than the 1984 revival, apparently. There was booing in the bed scene. The people booing did not stick around for the standing ovation.)

The six hour TV version of The Mahabharata (1989 film)? Not a problem.

I’ve enjoyed Mahler’s Third, which is an hour and three quarters; I’ve been puzzled by where the hell Brian’s Gothic was going, and its length at an hour and three quarters was not the reason why.

As long as the symphony is any good, I’m up for it. Just gimme a La-Z-Boy and a coffee, and I’m good to go.

Ζῶσμα

As of this writing, if a comment is reported, e.g. for BNBR, it is deleted. The BNBR notification includes the comment text (though the formatting suffers).

Therefore yes, Quora does delete comments.

I see an answer here from 2010. Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose.

Yes. In fact, recent UX changes—suppressing upvote counts in the feed, suppressing visibility of Most Viewed Writer—are (presumably) an attempt to mitigate this.

Yes, people upvote answers by very popular Quora users, regardless of whether they are any good or not. Yes, people upvote answers that show up from popular users in their feed, without scrutinising whether someone else came up with a better answer. Yes, there is a widespread perception of cliquishness and high school behaviour among Quora writers—and if you google, you’ll see that perception was in place among writers about Quora in tech journals, as far back as 2010 and 2011, even before the Quill.

*shrug* Like I say. Quora, seven years on, is making a stab at mitigating that.

Constantinos Kalampokis’ answer to What is said at Greek funerals? covers everything that happens at a funeral; but I’m assuming the question is particularly after what the condolence formula is.

Both Greek and Turkish are notorious in linguistics for having a formulaic expression for just about every occasion; it’s part of good social behaviour that you’re expected to come up with the right formula for the right occasion. Hence the proverbial expression for someone tactless: Πάρ’ τονα στο γάμο σου να σου πει «και του χρόνου», “Take this guy to your wedding, and he’ll wish you ‘Many Happy Returns!’”

In funerals, the formulaic expression is ζωή σε λόγου σας “life to you” (where λόγου σας “your word” is an old circumlocution for “you”, cf. “your lordship”). https://www.translatum.gr/forum/… offers the alternatives ζωή σε σας “life to you”, and να ζήσετε/ζείτε να τον/τη θυμάστε “may you live/keep living, so that you can keep remembering him/her” (i.e. may his/her memory survive in you).

Τα συλλυπητήριά μου “my condolences” is a more formal, stiff expression; I doubt you’d use it with friends. Κουράγιο “(have) courage!” is also heard, to acknowledge the hardship of family members.

I have a lot of time for the expression Να είναι ελαφρύ το χώμα που θα τον σκεπάσει “may the soil that covers him be light”. But that’s not used at funerals, it’s a valediction typically used for famous people.

This has been answered already, I’ll just answer it more anecdotally.

Indo-European has two words for apple, that show up in different daughter branches:

• *h₂ébōl shows up in Germanic (… apple), Celtic, Balto-Slavic, and probably Hittite šam(a)lu- ‘apple tree’
• *méh₂lom shows up in Greek (Doric mālon, Attic mēlon), Latin (mālum), Albanian (mollë), and Hittite maḫla ‘apple’

This has been a puzzle for Indo-Europeanists.

• Some Indo-Europeanists have assumed the genuine Indo-European word was *h₂ébōl, and *méh₂lom was a pre-Greek loanword.
• Some Indo-Europeanists have assumed that Indo-European had split up into northern and southern dialects, and dialects are allowed to have different words for the same thing—without one word being necessarily more Indo-European than the other.
• This was news to me: Proto-Indo-European phonology – Wikipedia says that some Indo-Europeanists have tried to unify the two forms as *h₂eml-:
• *h₂eml- > *h₂ebl- > *h₂ébōl
• *h₂eml- > *meh₂l- > *méh₂lom
• EDIT: And add the speculation by Guus Kroonen in On the origin of Greek μῆλον, Latin mālum, Albanian mollë and Hittite šam(a)lu- ‘apple’ that *méh₂lom, which he reconstructs as *smh₂l, is related to proto-Kartvelian (as in Georgian) *msxal- ‘pear’.

So much for apple. What’s the story with mălus ‘evil’?

As others have pointed out, the vowel in malus is short; so whatever it’s derived from, it’s not going to be derived from *méh₂lom (where the laryngeal h₂ serves to lengthen the preceding vowel).

malus – Wiktionary

From Proto-Italic, related to Oscan mallom and mallud (“bad”). Originally associated with Ancient Greek μέλας (mélas, “black, dark”), but support for this is waning. Perhaps from the same Proto-Indo-European root as Avestan [math]unicode{x10B28}unicode{x10B00}unicode{x10B0C}unicode{x10B2D}unicode{x10B0C}unicode{x10B0C}unicode{x10B00}[/math] (mairiia, “treacherous”).

Which means… we don’t know. All we do know is, it is indeed a coincidence. Although yes, it’s a coincidence mediaeval theologians have had a field day with. In fact, it’s likely the reason why Westerners assume the forbidden fruit was an apple: Forbidden fruit. De ligno autem scientiae boni et mali “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil/apples”. Jewish tradition instead pointed to the fig, the grape, or wheat.

If you go through her log, you will notice that Susan’s activity is intermittent. She posts for a few days, then is absent for months. In fact, her latest period of posting was her most protracted, and the first in which she posted on more than one topic.

Her being absent, in any case, has plenty of precedent.