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See

• Why do Americans use the spelling color and British use the spelling colour for the same word?
• Why do some people believe that the ‘ISE’ suffix is English and the IZE suffix is American?

There have been many proposals for spelling reform in English over the years, and in fact the variant spellings color and –ize have been around for a long time. (They reference Latin and Greek respectively, whereas colour and –ise are taken from French.)

As discussed in English-language spelling reform – Wikipedia, the spelling reforms proposed by Noah Webster had the most success of any, but they only succeeded in the US. Not all of his proposals were accepted: see 26 of Noah Webster’s Spelling Changes That Didn’t Catch On

Add Greek: φοράω κολώνια. Same word as for clothing.

I haven’t, but Matthew Sutton has: he has not written any answers since 2014, but is still actively commenting. See his bio for more.

As cited in Thrasymachus – Wikipedia

338c: φημὶ γὰρ ἐγὼ εἶναι τὸ δίκαιον οὐκ ἄλλο τι ἢ τὸ τοῦ κρείττονος συμφέρον. (“I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.”)

Clarissa, you have asked a bonafide sociologist and an anthropologist, and for some reason you’ve also asked me.

Sven Williams and Heinrich Müller have both advanced convincing and complementary accounts. Clearly, there are many social factors playing a role here, and there is room for more than one explanation.

The factors I’ll point to are on the Western side only, as I am not familiar with what happens in the East. I think they are contrary to the factors Heinrich identified, but like I said, there’s lots of stuff going on.

One narrative that prejudices Westerners against plastic surgery is the ideal of the natural beauty, and related to it the notion of authenticity as desirable. This is a fashion, as all ideals of Beauty are, but it is one that is on the ascendancy, as a reaction to past and present excesses. In fact the desirability of plastic boobs and of natural boobs is a competition happening in Western culture right now.

The reaction against silicone, ducklips, Botox and so on is partly just a swing of the pendulum, a reaction. Plastic surgery aims towards the current beauty ideal, and often overshoots past that ideal, to the derision of those who uphold that ideal. (Women more often than men, I suspect.) Partly, it is just a competing narrative of naturalness and unaffectedness and anti-consumerism, which of course can itself be just as consumerist a narrative.

The other social factor, which I think complements Sven’s explanation, and indirectly Heinrich’s, is that of vanity and frugality. To spend a lot of money on yourself looking good is condemned by many traditions within the West as wasteful and elitist. That narrative may not be dominant in Orange County, but Orange County is not the only cultural broadcaster in the West. The association of beauty enhancement with surgical procedures, which are dangerous and inaccessible to the masses, enhances any such anti-elitist condemnation.

Quora has hired freelancers to write questions in the past couple of months; see screenshot at the end.

We are looking for talented individuals who are highly motivated, have excellent written communication skills, and work efficiently and independently.

Quora is a platform where users can ask any question and get answers from real people with first-hand experience. You will write incisive and insightful questions to be answered by real-world experts on our platform. This role requires 5-10 hours per week, all remote.

Responsibilities:

• Write interesting and thoughtful questions in an assigned field, intended to be answered by real-world experts on Quora

Things we look for include:

• Bachelors degree, or working toward one
• Background in journalism is helpful but not required
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Strong editorial judgement and attention to detail
• Interest in technology, higher education, and/or finance, as those are the areas you will be asking questions in
• Organization and efficiency
• Ability to work independently with minimal direction—

There are pros and cons to such a move.

Quora’s interest is in becoming a go-to resource for Internet research. In topics that it prioritises but it feels have not been well covered by questions to date, paying for questions is a strategy to seed good answers from its expert users. By addressing such gaps in their topic coverage, and paying for well-researched questions that are relevant to those topics, they ensure that when questioners begin at Google, they have the opportunity to end up at Quora.

On the other hand, many Quora users see themselves as a community (note that the Quora ad does not use that terminology). From a community perspective, the notion that people are paid to contribute questions may be disturbing to them. It’s a particularly delicate matter, as Quora is already awarding Top Question Writer awards to community members, who contribute questions for free. Many users have said that they want Quora to have better communication about their goals and policies. If there is a negative gut-reaction to the idea of Quora paying for questions, some of it will certainly stem from the lack of communication about it.

I think Quora should have considered how it would come across when a user accidentally stumbled on the job ad (as I have done), and I think Quora should have preempted any reaction by explaining that they were doing this—and that they still appreciate the freely contributed questions that come from the community.

You could argue there’s a slippery slope between pay-to-ask and pay-to-answer. As perusal of freelancing sites shows, people are already doing pay-to-answer on Quora, to boost their social media profile, but Quora has not been doing anything of the sort.

I would argue there is a difference between questions and answers, though. Questions are the stimulus to the content, but the answers are the content people come to see; that’s why answers are left as the user’s intellectual property, while questions belong to the community and not the user. As Yishan Wong pointed out so long ago (Yishan Wong’s answer to Why are my questions not answered on Quora?),

Quora is a great place to write answers and to read answers, but it is not a good place to get your own questions answered.

Quora hiring people to ask good questions does not detract from the independence and quality of the answers to those questions.

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The discrepancy you’re seeing between Pavlos Daskalakis (Παύλος Δασκαλάκης)’s answer to How do I phonetically write my name in Greek? and Goru Yamato’s answer to How do I phonetically write my name in Greek? are two:

• Where you accent Cotera on, as Goru said;
• Whether you want to assimilate Hristo linguistically and make it declinable (Χρήστος), or keep it indeclinable (Χρήστο, or indeed just phonetically spelled Χρίστο). That basically depends on whether you want to assimilate into the society or not. If you’re going to be in conversation with Greeks, assimilating is a gesture that will be appreciated; if this is just a one off, or if you are unlikely to be chatting to them in Greek, it’s unnecessary.

The idiomatic, as opposed to the literal translation of “fuck school” is να το χέσω το σχολείο “may I shit on it, school”. Topicalises school with a clitic pronoun, and uses “shitting on” to express contempt.

So, here’s the mainstream answer. 🙂

Greek had iota, eta, and upsilon as different letters, because they used to be pronounced differently:

• Iota was always an /i/
• Eta was a long /ɛː/. In fact, in many archaic variants of the Greek alphabet, it was written as an epsilon /e/; that was the case in Athens before 404 BC, when they adopted the Ionic variant of the alphabet, which had the eta as an /ɛː/ instead of a /h/. Eta switched from /ɛː/ to /i/ some time around 300 AD, although there are dialects of Greek where an /e/ value survives for eta (notably Pontic).
• Upsilon was probably originally /u/; in Attic it was /y/. The switch to /i/ is very recent: we have a poem from 1030 AD where a priest is made fun of for pronouncing ξύλον as ξίλον. There are dialects in which a /y/ pronounciation survives as /ju/; they include Tsakonian, Old Athenian, and Maniot.

That’s the history. Modern Greek uses those letters because its orthography is historical: if a word was spelled in Ancient Greek with an eta or an upsilon, it still will be spelled with one in Modern Greek. A lot of the controversy around modern Greek orthography in the early 20th century was because philologists had to work out the etymology of modern words, to work out how they should be spelled. Hence the switch of “to watch” from κυττάω to κοιτάω.

There was also a tendency to use the old variant i’s anachronistically, in transliterating loanwords and foreign names. A long /e/ would be transliterated as αι; a long /i/ as η; a long /o/ as ω; a spelling <y> as υ. So Σαίξπηρ <Saixpēr> for Shakespeare, which is just pronounced /sekspir/. That tendency has been abandoned the last few decades. I spell train as τραίνο <traino>, but I’m old; the spelling being taught now is τρένο <treno>. The ratio of the old-fashioned Χίλαρυ <Chilary> to the phonetic Χίλαρι <Chilari> online for Hillary is 1:50.

-akis is the patronymic suffix used in Crete; it’s a diminutive, like most patronymics in Greek surnames are.

The surname in Greek is Galifianakis Γαλιφιανάκης or Galyfianakis Γαλυφιανάκης; I see the upsilon surname much more frequently online (except with reference to Zach himself). Galifianos means “from Galifa”; there are references online to a Galifian carnival, ΓΑΛΥΦΙΑΝΟ ΚΑΡΝΑΒΑΛΙ 2012. Galifa in turn is a village in Crete near Iraklio: Γαλίφα Ηρακλείου – Βικιπαίδεια. The village is first mentioned in a census from 1538, and has a current population of 250. The village is spelled with both iota and upsilon.

I don’t know the etymology of the village name, but the related adjective γαλίφης “flatterer” comes from the Italian gaglioffo. An Italian name makes sense as Crete was under Venetian rule; not sure why a village would be called “female flatterer” though.