Category: Uncategorized

Well, not as spectacular a story as some. Just answers.

7 days:

5k is on the low end, so maybe less traffic than usual. I have been busy with freelance work this past couple of weeks, so I have been writing somewhat less than my usual deluge of stuff. Spike yesterday is from the inexplicably popular Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some cultural faux pas in Australia?

30 days:

That’s more like it: it varies between 5k and 10k these days. Some spikes, but actually no one overwhelming answer.

3 months:

The gaps at the start are of course the days the stats died (The Statistics Black Hole by Nick Nicholas on The Memes of Production). The peaks are my most viral answer to date, and not an answer I take any warm fuzzies in: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which Indian states are well known in other countries?

Vote #1 Jay Wacker: Jay Wacker’s answer to What exactly is Wikidata and what is its relationship to Quora topics and questions?

To break down what Jay said just a bit further:

An ontology is an organisation of concepts in the world. Quora’s existing hierarchy of topics is one, contributed to by Quora askers, Quora topic gnomes, and whatever the initial seeding of it was within Quora.

Wikidata’s ontology is a rather bigger ontology. It has been contributed to by Wikipedia editors, in all the various language versions, and many other online projects.

In addition to the benefits Jay has mentioned: the Wikidata ontology has more information about its topics than the Quora one does. In particular, it has more explicit links between subtopics and their parent topics; more identification of topics as people; more identifications of topics as places, and the geographical coordinates of those places. (As well as all the information contained within the related Wikipedia articles; and the infoboxes in Wikipedia are all machine-readable by design.)

By matching Quora topics to Wikidata topics, Quora can work out parent/child topic links, which are pretty crucial to how topics are used. (You have to explicitly tell Quora that sociolinguistics is a subtopic of linguistics, and if you don’t, people subscribing to linguistics will not receive new sociolinguistics questions. Multiply that by every new topic ever.) Quora can produce maps of location topics, and work out which places are close to each other, which can also help the related topic suggester. Quora can narrow down which topics are (famous?) people. Quora can work out which topics are bona fide ambiguous, where it hasn’t already.

Questions and answers rely on a topic ontology. Quora is now upgrading from a smallish homebrew ontology, to a much bigger and authoritative homebrew ontology.

My translation (and you can tell):

Account: Traducteur de questions Quora

Question: How does the Quora Question Translator work?

Question Details: How are the questions to be translated chosen? What is the level of supervision over this bot by the site owners? What is its anticipated level of activity?

Réponse de Sihem Soibinet-Fekih à Comment fonctionne le Traducteur de questions Quora ? (Sihem Soibinet-Fekih, A2A by Jay Wacker)

We select questions internally according to a series of search filters. For example, we observe the popularity of questions asked on English Quora, and work out which could be successful or provoke interest among French-speaking users.

The questions are then submitted to a machine translation platform to be adapted into French. The translated questions may be revised if we decide that the adapted version can be improved.

Day by day, we improve French Quora to give you a version of the site most faithful to the English and Spanish versions, while bearing in mind that each audience is unique to each language, and that the site should be subject to its own cultural specifics.

The original Indo-European declensions were thematic (corresponding to the Greek second declension) and athematic (corresponding to the Greek third declension).

The first declension was a late innovation in Proto-Indo-European, involving a suffixed –e[math]h_2[/math] > -ā. It postdates the split of Hittite.

The masculine first declension nouns were an even later innovation, and they were specific to two patterns: the agent suffix –tās/tēs, and adjectival compounds like chrysokomēs ‘golden-haired’. Sihler just shrugs his shoulders about –tās:

The functional specialization of the type as an agent noun is partly the result of its coincidental similarity to inherited -τηρ, -τωρ [the more archaic agent suffix]. Why the formation would show an early and striking partiality for masc. ā-stem inflection, rather than (say) masc *-τος, fem. *-τᾱ, is however an enigma. (§267)

The adjective ending on the other hand looks to me a pummelling of a feminine noun into a masculine: χρυσὴ κώμη ‘golden.fem hair.fem’ > χρυσο-κώμη-ς {golden-hair.fem}.masc.

So, the first declension originated as a feminine declension. A masculine first declension was tacked on in proto-Greek. There was never any driver to add on a neuter first declension as well: there was no agent suffix or adjective formation that would make it happen. But that’s just randomness as much as anything.

There’s an excerpt of the 1536 Old and New Testament by Ioannikios Kartanos: Παλαιά τε και Νέα Διαθήκη. However that is a translation of an Italian paraphrase, and not really a translation.

A list of the New Testament translations is available at Μεταφράσεις της Αγίας Γραφής. The list includes:

• Maximos of Gallipoli, 1638
• Vamvas, 1850 (Biblehub)
• Pallis, 1902
• Louvaris & Hastoupis, 1960
• “The Four Professors”, Vellas, Antoniadis, Alivizatos & Konidaris, 1967 (NTV?)
• Jehovah’s Witnesses translation, 1993
• Filos, 1993 (Bible.is)
• Zodiatis, 1994
• Delikostopoulos, 1995
• Today’s Greek Version (Η Αγία Γραφή, Μετάφραση από τα Πρωτότυπα Κείμενα), 1997 (TGV: http://el.bibles.com presumably)

The 1638 translation by Maximos of Gallipoli is not online, as far as I can tell. It was published in 1999 (and I own it): Μάξιμος Καλλιπολίτης, Η Καινή Διαθήκη του Κυρίου ημών Ιησού Χριστού, Επιμ, Εμμανουήλ Χ. Κάσδαγλη , Τόμος Α’, ΜΙΕΤ Αθήνα 1995, Τόμος Β’,ΜΙΕΤ Αθήνα 1999, Επιλεγόμενα Άλκη Αγγέλου, Παράρτημα Συναγωγή Μεταφρασμάτων, Επιμέλεια Ευφημίας Εξίσου / Αγαμέμνονα Τσελίκα,ΜΙΕΤ Αθήνα 1999,

The 1902 translation into Demotic of the Gospels by Alexandros Pallis—the one that caused riots in Athens and 8 deaths—is available as a PDF: Η Νέα Διαθήκη : κατά το βατικανό χειρόγραφο / μεταφρασμένη από τον Αλέξ. Πάλλη.

Interesting question, and the way I’d want to tackle it is by defining what it is that unpaid work means. See also Could writing on Quora be considered voluntary work?

Work is undertaking an obligation to do tasks, that in themselves benefit another more than yourself. The compensation for work may take the form of payment, or barter, or incurring an obligation, or not being beaten to death as a slave; but the work itself is not meant to be its own reward. That tends to rule most of us out.

The closest to an acknowledgement of Quora contributions as work is by Stephanie Vardavas, in her answer. Community moderation tasks are less for fun, and more out of a sense of obligation to the community. But still, it’s community work; Quora Inc may benefit out of that work, but I trust Stephanie isn’t motivated to collapse trolls out of admiration for D’Angelo’s blue eyes. So it’s not the same as Work For Quora; and indeed, the community work Stephanie does benefits Stephanie as a member of the community.

I think it’ll be hard to find anyone considering Quora contributions as work to benefit another; possibly academics counting this as part of their Community Outreach?

The Ethnologue: Languages of the World guesses 850. On the one hand, the Ethnologue is best placed to know, since it is published by SIL International, and the SIL has the missionary linguists on the ground, who far outnumber academic linguists. On the other hand, the Ethnologue is consistently a splitter not a lumper. 850 is the best estimate that we have, but it is still an estimate on the high side.

Any literacy in PNG has been introduced by missionaries or linguists speaking a Western European language, and I am not aware of any PNG languages with a script other than Roman.

The languages of PNG belong in two groups: Austronesian, which are recognisably related to the other Austronesian languages of Indonesia and the Pacific; and the Papuan languages, which were spoken before the Austronesian languages arrived. We do not have sufficient evidence that the Papuan languages are even related to each other as the same family; we just lump them together as pre-Austronesian.

There is abandonment of tokples (indigenous languages) for Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu, and English; but I don’t have information on how rapid it is.

You know, the songs that are candidates for this question, I’ve already posted as my favourite songs. But with David Caune and Kat Rectenwald both asking me, sure, I’ll answer again:

• The regrets of my life, my falls from grace, my sadness at leaving things behind:

Gustav Mahler: Der Tamboursg’sell

O Galgen, du hohes Haus,
Du siehst so furchtbar aus,
Ich schau dich nicht mehr an,
Weil i weiß, daß i gehör dran.

Wenn Soldaten vorbeimarschieren,
Bei mir nicht einquartieren.
Wenn sie fragen, wer i g’wesen bin:
Tambour von der Leibkompanie.

Gallows, you high house,
you look so terrifying,
I’ll look no more upon you,
for I know that I belong there.

When soldiers march by me,
they won’t set up camp next to me.
When they ask me who I used to be:
A drummer in the imperial bodyguard!

• Seeking a friend to unburden my pains to:

Manos Eleftherious/Stavros Kouyoumtzis: Όποιος τραγουδάει τον πόνο

Μου ’πες μια καλή κουβέντα
και γονάτισα στη γη
κι έβγαλε νερό η πέτρα
η ψυχή μου για να πιει.

Όποιος τραγουδάει τον πόνο
στη ζωή δε θα χαθεί
κι ένας φίλος μες στον κόσμο
θα του συμπαρασταθεί.

You spoke a kind word
and I kneeled to the ground
and the rock gave forth water
for my soul to drink.

Whoever sings of pain
will not perish in this life
and one friend in the world
will stand by him.

• The abandon of exuberance, and letting sorrows go by for another day:

James Brown: Sex Machine

Get up
Get up
Get on the scene
Like a sex machine (uh)

The way I like it
is the way it is
I got mine
Don’t worry about his.

To Tasos Anesiadis’ answer (Tasos Anesiadis’ answer to What are the most difficult things to learn in the Modern Greek language?), I’ll add for Modern Greek:

• The chaos introduced by the clash of spelling pronunciations from Ancient Greek (via Puristic), and vernacular pronunciations. [nd] vs [nð]; clusters like [fθr]; [i] vs [j] before a vowel (άδεια, two syllables as “empty”, three syllables as “day off”).
• The subtler points of when to use the subjunctive (e.g. θέλω αυτοκίνητο που [να] κοστίζει 100 χιλ ευρώ I want a car which costs €100k vs I want a car which should cost €100k—the former implies you have a specific car in mind, the latter is a generic reference).

Greek:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do Greeks use Roman letters for serving the same purpose as the way we use Greek letters for different values of constants?

The very most you’ll see is High School algebra pretending x y are the Greek letters χ ψ through strategic use of Greek cursive.

On Greek cursive, see Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does an equivalent of cursive exist in other alphabets?

I actually don’t know if that extends in Greek high school to the third algebraic variable being omega. I doubt it.