English spelling is infamously irregular. Is it possible for it to branch into several categories (e.g., Germanic spelling, French spelling, Greek spelling, etc.)?

Yes indeed. Bear in mind in particular that Greek and Latin fall under the rules of Traditional English pronunciation of Latin. (Greek is almost always borrowed into English via Latin; but there are late exceptions like kudos, not †cydus.) Those rules are not the rules of French words in English. For example, final –e in a Greek word like psyche is always pronounced; it is never pronounced in French or Germanic words.

(That link should be mandatory reading for everyone ever btw. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve learned from it.)

Germanic and French spellings get squashed together via the crucible of Middle English spelling—and Middle English itself; but you can still discern differences. For example <k> is a Germanic thing; word-final stress is a French thing.

Is Quora’s BNBR policy reasonable?

This has been said plenty by others, and I’m just clearing my backlog with this, but:

All justice is reasonable when administered with equity. See Michael Masiello’s answer to What do you hate about Quora as of March 2017?

BNBR sure does not look like it is administered with equity. Moderation does not do context or extenuating circumstance, and it’s not supposed to.

But that’s the complaint about the implementation of BNBR.

I have plenty of concerns about BNBR as a policy itself: I think it is problematic.

BNBR licences bad knowledge and truthiness: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why has Quora become a magnet for flat Earth and Moon landing conspiracy questions that must be given BNBR respect, even though they’re undeserving? BNBR suppresses criticism of individuals, and has a chilling effect on criticism of a lot of things. BNBR gets fetishised as an end in itself, rather than a means to more civil discourse. And BNBR is blatantly culture-specific: there is no universal measure of niceness or respect. (So everyone gets measured by a Northern Californian norm. Or that of the subcontractors thereof, or that of the bots thereof.)

These are all controversial claims, and there’s plenty of arguments to be made for and against. But saying BNBR is reasonable as a given, before moving on to how it is misapplied in practice, is not how those arguments get had.

Do you spend more or less time writing and reading on Quora than you do interacting with ‘live’ people each day? I am attempting to assess how my time compares. Am I the only addict?

On days when I’m catching up on A2A backlogs (such as today), me. My time on Quora varies between half an hour and six hours a day. It is, on average, way too much.

How do Quora’s algorithms “understand” irony?

I agree with Dion Shaw’s answer: detecting irony is a subtle skill, which requires you to deduce, from real world knowledge, that the speaker intends the complete opposite of what they’re literally saying, and that they think it’s appropriate to do so because they regard the question as not worth answering literally (typically because they regard the answer as obvious).

Computers aren’t doing well at detecting irony in general, and the problem is AI-hard. (Real Artificial Intelligence, with a social and intentional factor, not just machine learning.) In fact, the one paper I read about it recently was as crude as it possibly could be—it only got so far as working out that the person was speaking an untruth, ergo, Irony! But of course lying, error, and irony are not the same thing at all, even if all of them reduce to the same truth-conditional purview of a statement not being true.

Quora’s algorithms, sadly, as not in the business of extracting truth from ironic answers, which is at least part of the reason why Joke Answers are frowned upon. I have to say, I find it difficult to see how Quora’s algorithms are extracting meaning from the wide range of answers given here at all. But they don’t have to; they merely have to understand upvotes, credentials, and social networks of users.

Can you appeal moderation decisions on behalf of another user? Would it help?

I’m answering this with all the coldness that Quora Moderation has earned. Remember: it’s just business.

The normal appeals process is the only one that Quora wants you to use. Anyone can lodge a ticket, saying they’re appealing, and nothing’s stopping you from naming person X rather than yourself in the free text of the “I want to appeal a moderation decision” form. The form certainly doesn’t specify that it’s a decision against you that you’re appealing; you can hyperlink to someone else’s collapsed answer, for instance.

That’s the normal appeals process. It can take months for a reply (many of us can confirm as much), and if the decision is negative, you get no reply at all.

Quora used to have dedicated email addresses for appeals, which are now officially being phased out: Why does ‘moderation@Quora.com’ not work? And why does the email Quora gives, ‘appeals+other@Quora.com’ not work either? They want you going through the one channel, which is manageable.

This likely is why the informal channel, of directly emailing a moderator (or topwriters@quora as a proxy), is no longer being volunteered on Quora, though it was last year. You can still try that channel on the user’s behalf. You can, if you are a Top Writer, chat to a moderator directly on the user’s behalf. I have seen occasional reports that this still happens. It may work, it may not.

Of course it’s not in Quora’s interest to promote by-passing formal channels, and relying on the favouritism of Top Writers.

Of course having a default appeals process that takes months and acts like a Schrödinger Cat In A Box is not in Quora’s users’ interest.

The divergence between Quora’s aims and the users’ is an exercise for the reader.

What was the last thing you wrote by hand?

The title to this video. A late hit (1961) by the great Markos Vamvakaris, that I have slightly maliciously aligned to my current feelings about Quora.

This is a lame way of getting this video out, but it works for me!

Quora Bot as female lead, Nick Nicholas as male lead; Quora staff as female backup, Quora users as male backup

(In general: I take notes to myself as to-dos at work a few times a week; I take notes in meetings by pen occasionally, but in general I write things down rarely.)

What do you do if you’ve spread yourself too thin on Quora because you have many different interests? How do you decide what questions to respond to?

I’m suffering this right now.

If you’re overrun with A2As, as I am: don’t get around to answering them in a hurry. And if someone else has gotten around it before you do, and you’re happy with their answer, well, that’s a win, isn’t it? 🙂

I would not dilute my interests, but I would let some questions slide. I’m not good at that, but what’s the alternative.

How did the Byzantine Empire named the Mediterranean Sea?

The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium confirms John Bard’s answer:

As late as the 4th C., the Mediterranean continued to be an “inner sea,” totally surrounded by the territory of the Roman Empire. It was the only sea for Greeks, the esō thalassa [internal sea] (Aristotle) as opposed to the exō thalassa [external sea] or ocean; for the Latins the mare internum, intestinum, or nostrum. The term mare mediterraneum did not appear until the 3rd C.; Isidore of Seville used it in the early 7th C. (O. Maull. RE 15 [1932] 2222). The Byz. did not have a general term for the Mediterranean, although they used special names for its parts—the Aegean, Ionian, Tyrsenikon (or Tyrrhenian), Sikelikon, Kretikon pelagos [sea].

Should I just stop trying to be more likable, and be myself if I have found a way to do it with out hurting or offending others?

Abigail, I go all Michaelis Maus whenever I see unanimity. I go all the more Michaelis Maus now that Michaelis has been banned.

It’s hard for me to, because the OP (who has since deleted their account) put in the proviso: “without hurting or offending others”.

But pay attention to that: they had to. Being yourself is not a paramount goal. You still have to be part of society. You still have to be not-yourself enough, in order not to make your life a constant battle. You need discretion in life, too, and discretion is about holding back on being yourself.

If you’ve found a way to do that, that’s great: that means you’ve worked out discretion. But it’s not a one-off deal. You need to recalibrate how much of yourself you need to suppress, to be more likeable, in given social circumstances; and those circumstances are going to change, and expand, as you move around. They’ll certainly get more constrained in the workplace, for example. It’s a balancing act, and you’re going to keep balancing. Middle age is about grubby compromises. We do what we can get away with.

No good saying this to OP, they’re not here. Good luck to the rest of you.

What is the so-called Greek word Albania/Αλβανιά (derogatory word), and from what does it stem?

There’s a lot of subtle linguistic history going on here.

The –ia suffix for names of countries did not get used much in the vernacular of 1800, but when it did, it was pronounced in the vernacular way, as –ja: the vernacular did not tolerate -e– or –i– as a separate syllable before another vowel, and reduced them to yod.

Thus, the vernacular name for the Ottoman Empire, as anyone who has paid attention to Greek folk song knows, was Τουρκιά turˈkja. The vernacular name for Bulgaria was Βουργαριά vurɣarˈja. The vernacular name for Venice was Βενετιά venetˈja (hence the saying έχασε η Βενετιά βελόνι, “Venice has lost a needle” = “big deal”, since everyone knew how rich Venice was). The peasantry rarely had occasion to speak of individual Western countries, but they did refer to the West, collectively, as Φραγκιά fraŋˈɡja “Frankdom”; thus the folk song about 1453 saying Mόν’ στείλτε λόγο στη Φραγκιά, να ’ρτουνε τριά καράβια “Send word to Frankdom to send three ships.”

The vernacular name for Albanians at the time was Αρβανίτες arvaˈnites, and the name from them as a group, or for their country, was Αρβανιτιά arvaniˈtja. As you can guess, this conflates the Christian ethnic Albanians living in Southern Greece (which are now called Arvanites) with the majority Muslim Albanians of Albania proper; if they needed to differentiate the former, they called them Muslim Albanians, which (given the lack of subtlety of the Millet system) was rendered as τουρκαρβανίτες “Turk Arvanites.” (Hence contemporary confusion by Greeks reading old sources, who assume they were some sort of mixed race).

After the introduction of Puristic Greek, and the corresponding looking down on the vernacular, the archaic -i.a form of the suffix displaced the vernacular –ja form. A real country deserved a “real” form of the suffix, and only the classical form –i.a would do. fraŋˈɡja was replaced with Ἑσπερία (H)espeˈri.a, and individuated Roman names (Gallˈi.a, Itaˈli.a, Germaˈni.a, Angˈli.a). turˈkja was replaced with turˈki.a, and vurɣarˈja with vulɣaˈri.a.

And in time the ethnic Albanians of southern Greece, who were being assimilated, were carefully differentiated from the Albanians of Albania, who were not: the former were left with a slight more archaic form of their name, Αλβανίται alvaˈnite (though eventually the vernacular arvaˈnites was restored), and the latter were distanced from the alvaˈnite by the rather older form of their name, which also matched what was being used in the West: Αλβανοί alvaˈni. Their country, accordingly, was Αλβανία alvaˈni.a.

Now the vernacular suffix –ja did not disappear from the face of the earth. It had other uses that remained in Demotic Greek, quite prominently as a nominaliser (στενοχώρια stenoxorˈja ‘sadness’, αρχοντιά arxontˈja ‘nobility’), and as an indication of sudden action (< –e.a: σπαθιά spaθˈja ‘blow of the sword’). But it was mostly displaced by the Puristic –i.a in names of countries and collectives.

Where it was not displaced was in country names, it’s because they weren’t “real” country names, within the reach of officialdom. Karvavitsas’ 1897 novel “The Beggar” shows a subtle distinction between Bulgaria (given its official name) and Vlachia (= Wallachia), as Rumania would still have been colloquially known: στη Σμύρνη, στην Πόλη, στη Βουλγαρία έως επάνω στη Βλαχιά! vulɣaˈri.a vs. vlaxˈja.

The suffix, as I said, also remained used as a nominaliser; when added to names of ethnic groups, it then denoted behaviour stereotypical of the group. I gave the example of arxontˈja ‘lordliness = nobility’; but given xenophobia, such nominalisations were mostly negative. So γύφτος ˈɣiftos ‘Gyspy’ > γυφτιά ɣiftˈja ‘Gypsy behaviour = uncivilised behaviour’. Βλάχος ˈvlaxos ‘Vlach; highlander’ > βλαχιά vlaxˈja or βλαχουριά vlaxurˈja ‘Vlachdom (used both positively and negatively of the Vlach nation—the Aromanian speakers of the southern Balkans); Wallachia (= Southern Romania); uncouthness’.

The homophonous suffix –ja < –ˈe.a, meaning a sudden action (spaθˈja ‘blow of the sword’) has expanded wondrously itself in colloquial Greek, to mean an action in general; it too is latterly applied to country names. So αμερικανιά amerikanˈja is a stereotypically American action (and it will not be meant in a good way); the SLANG.gr definition (Hi Melinda!) is:

Derogatory description of something we dislike and which is American. Usually used of movies. Often expresses the inability of the utter to express serious critical discourse rather than a specific attribute of what is being criticised. Example: “How was the film?” “An amerikanˈja.” “What do you mean?” “I’m telling you: an amerikanˈja.”

So. I actually have not ever heard the expression Αλβανιά alvanˈja. But this is what it can mean.

  • It cannot be an old-fashioned, ballad-like name for Albania or Albaniandom, the way turˈkja or vurɣarˈja are. (vurɣarˈja, Google tells me, is still used in a hostile way by soldiers on the Bulgarian border.) It cannot be, because the stem is not vernacular: it’s alvanˈja, using the Puristic form of the stem, not the original vernacular arvanitˈja.
  • It can be a derogatory description of an action (à la amerikanˈja). The xenophobic stereotype of what Albanians are like must have moved on since 1990s, but if I were confronted with an expression like τι αλβανιά πήγες κι έκανες, “What sort of Albanianry have you gone and done”, I would assume that petty crime or smuggling was involved.
  • It can be a derogatory term for behaviour xenophobically stereotypical of Albanians. Pretty much as above, but not the description of a one-off action, but of habitual behaviour.
  • It can be a derogatory term for Albania itself, or for a collective of Albanians.