Author: admin

The intention of the Unicode Regional Indicator Symbols was to represent current countries in existence (as encoded in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2), as locales for software; the flags are a lagniappe. (A rather unfortunate lagniappe.)

Hence, no SPQR flag: the point of the codes is to indicate the country you live in, as a two letter ISO code, to be used for software localisation. (E.g. use Serbian rather than Russian italics for Cyrillic.) The Roman Empire doesn’t have such a code, because you don’t live in it—though a bunch of defunct 20th century states do.

There’s a proposal to throw the door open for Emoji flags to regions such as Scotland and California. Per UTS #51: Unicode Emoji, those are still restricted to present-day national subdivisions, and historical states are not in scope for them.

They did:

• Dalmatian language – Wikipedia
• Istro-Romanian language – Wikipedia
• Aromanian language – Wikipedia
• Megleno-Romanian language – Wikipedia

What happened is quite simple: Slavic tribes moved into the area quite rapidly, between 500 and 800. Slavonic displaced Romance languages in most areas they moved into, with a few enclaves surviving.

The real question is not why don’t Yugoslavians speak Romance, but why Romanians do over such a wide area. Origin of the Romanians – Wikipedia shows that there is not a consensus around it, and of course the question is clouded by politics.

• Either there was a continguous compact Latin-speaking population in Romania, which resisted Slavonic assimilation (Theory of Daco-Roman continuity);
• or Romania was resettled by Latin-speaking populations (Aromanians) from enclaves south of the Danube (Immigrationist or Admigrationist theory). The Aromanians are highland shepherds, so they were not in regular contact with Slavs settling the lowlands.

I’m just going to leave this statement in support of Quora made by another user here:

Had everyone behaved themselves, it wouldn’t have come to this.

I’ve edited out my BNBR about it. But statements such as these have led me to blocking users. I can have no discussion with someone whose notion of justice works like this.

Quora had a problem with anonymous content, and has destroyed the village in order to save it. What were they thinking? That this will make the problem go away. And that they will be able to keep the lid on fake accounts.

Which demonstrates again that they are in so much denial about being social media, they refuse to learn anything from social media.

As Talleyrand said: It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

BTW, per details:

1. If you make updates, you’re screwed because you’re no longer anonymous and everything is permanently recorded in the log.

If this is true, Quora is compromising its users’ anonymity without warning. And will richly deserve all the negative publicity it gets for it.

Should Quora honour the commitments it has made publicly and eponymously?

(Improvements to Anonymity on Quora by Riley Patterson on The Quora Blog. Remember that name.)

Yes.

In Riley’s sentence:

All anonymous content will be reviewed for spam and harassment before receiving distribution,

(remember, he put his name to that statement),

should “fairly dimwitted bot, of the caliber we can expect of Quora bots in the year 2017” be understood to be the subject of the weaselly passive, and a satisfactory level of review?

No.

I’m sure Quora thinks Yes. Because they want this done on the cheap. The answer is still No.

Should Quora commit to vetting questions to decide if anonymity is appropriate or just trolling?

How well is the “new anonymity” policy on Quora working at filtering out bad content, as of March 20, 2017?

If this is the level of their vetting, better not to have made that undertaking at all.

Bridegrooms, Bonfires, and Woodchucks: Folk Etymologies in English. From that link:

• The textbook examples for English are sparrowgrass for asparagus, and bridegroom, which should have been bridegoom. (The word gome for “man” became extinct, so people grabbed the nearest similar word. Now that the noun groom for “horse attendant” has also become extinct, people use groom to mean bridegroom.)
• Apparently cockroach is a folk etymology mangling of cucaracha, and Algonquin otchek became woodchuck.
• A bonfire was originally bonefire; people assumed the bon- is French.
• The change of femelle to female in English was a folk etymology linking it to male.

An example I discovered just this year, because of Quora, is the Greek for toyboy or twink, teknó. It looks like a mis-stressed version of the Ancient Greek téknon “child”, the word with which priests address their parishioners. (Insert your own joke here.)

In fact, it’s from the Romany tiknó, “small (child)”. Kaliarda, the cant of Greek street queens in the 60s, used Romany for its base vocabulary, just as its counterpart Polari for English used Italian. Someone along the line noticed the similarity of tiknó to téknon, and switched the vowel accordingly. (Amusingly, someone also noticed it in 1800: Etymologicon magnum, or Universal etymological dictionary, on a new plan [By W. Whiter].)

… Unless Romany tiknó is derived from téknon itself, of course. But I’m reasonably sure it isn’t: Scandoromani derives it from Sanskrit tīkṣṇa “sharp”.

Some celebrity nicknames are funny, and ingenious, and a sign that you have made it big, if you have an instantly recognizable nickname.

On the other hand, some celebrity nicknames show familiar contempt for celebrities, and I like those too. Australian bent in these.

• Madge for Madonna
• This. So delightfully pulling her down a peg.
• Jacko or Wacko Jacko for Michael Jackson
• The Silver Budgie for Bob Hawke
• Silver-haired, short
• The Singing Budgie for Kylie Minogue
• Sings, short
• The Mad Monk for Tony Abbott
• Former seminarian, volatile, social conservative
• Dipper for Robert DiPierdomenico
• Farnsey and Barnsey for John Farnham and Jimmy Barnes
• The rhyme was used as a commentary on the uniformity of Australian rock radio being monopolised by them

I already substantially answered this on Nick Nicholas’ answer to How long did it take you to become popular on Quora?

As I’ve reported in that and other answers, it was a combination of two things:

• No longer paying attention to new followers.
• Having lots of chat with users outside my areas of core expertise.

The topic about me didn’t make as much of an impression on me as it seems to have to some. The attention the “Discord Teens” seem to be paying me has, admittedly, taken me aback.

Yup, around 10. Set in Liliput, because I’d just read Gulliver’s Travels, and accompanied by some map drawing. Inspired by the Latin textbooks I was poring over, and it had a hell of a lot of declension tables. And diacritics. El Glheþ Talossan-level diacritics. Coz they’re k00l.

It wasn’t full, because I don’t think I understood enough about language back then; vocabulary was never a problem though—there’s always more Latin where that came from. Never taught it to anyone. Don’t remember a thing about it.

There was no direct contact between Ancient Greeks and China. There were a couple of very limited trade missions between the Roman Empire and China, and from what I remember the information exchange was pretty mangled.

Lots of Chinese was translated into European languages once the Jesuits made contact, led by Matteo Ricci in the 17th century.

But you did not say European, you said Indo-European. The obvious place to look is India. There was clearly translation in the other direction of the Buddhist scriptures, to the extent of the Chinese theorising about translation practice: Chinese translation theory. But the earliest indication I’ve found of the reverse direction is in the 7th century AD:

Translation in China

The most important figure of the first peak of translation in China was the famous monk of the Tang dynasty—Xuan Zang (600-664), who was the main character in A Journey to the West. […]

Xuan Zang was also the first Chinese translator who translated out of Chinese. He translated some of Lao Zi’s (the father of Taoism) works into Sanskrit. He also attempted to translate some other classical Chinese literature for the people of India.

The next indication of translation activity into Indo-European I find is 14th century, under the Pax Mongolica, by Rashid-al-Din Hamadani: (see here). “Among Rashideddin’s other works are four volumes of translations from Chinese into Persian, works that he could not have produced by himself, as well as works on agriculture and medicine that incorporate either translations from Chinese or extensive information on Chinese practice derived from Chinese sources.”

Greeks don’t know the song. Most Greeks barely know about Chameria. And nationalist Greeks who know how the song has become a rallying point for Çam identity may well react with hostility. God knows I read a couple of shitfights on YouTube.

But given the translation and someone who’s not nationalist (e.g. Dimitris Almyrantis: Dimitris Almyrantis’ answer to What do Greeks think of the song of Çelo Mezanit?), you’ll get the recognition of something culturally familiar.

To answer the question, I’m going to YouTube, ignoring the typical “Fuck you Greek pederast” “Fuck you Albanian cur” stuff, and translate the comments made in Greek to a different recording:

• Epirot and Albanian, it’s almost the one music.
• We cry and celebrate with the same songs. Whatever they may say, our blood is so mixed together, whether we like it or not.
• Finally a YouTube user with serious and truthful attitudes! Good health to you and your family, sir! Good luck!
• [I didn’t translate Prentas Dimtris’ comments, because I actually didn’t understand them; Greek as Foreign Language, I surmise]

I’m not trying to whitewash anything by quoting those. Just point out that if Greeks aren’t given the political context that the song has acquired, and just listen and read the lyrics, they’ll actually like it.

I did too, although I think I’ve heard ballads that got to the point more directly.