Category: Uncategorized

On a scale of one to ten, what’s your favourite colour in the alphabet?

I’ve answered a few questions like this by saying “I wish I could say that I did, just to be contrary, but really, I don’t.”

And it is true, as Melinda Gwin has said, that being here is quite humbling at times. That I realise that I have a lot to learn about philosophy and theology (from people like, oh, I dunno, Melinda), or literature (from our mutual Magister) or politics (from Victoria the Mahlerphobe) or history (like Dimitris Almyrantis) or Greekness (like Dimitra Triantafyllidou), or X or Y or Z. That I am here to learn.

And I am also here to hang out with people I have come to regard as friends, and if not friends, then certainly cherished acquaintances, who bring a smile to my face and balm to my soul.

But I post too.

And when I post? Absolutely it strokes my intellectual ego, and so it bloody well should. Several times a week, I will go through my profile feed to see stuff I’ve written recently, and thought yeah, that was a good argument; yeah, that was witty; yeah, that was passionate and needed to be said.

You mean you don’t?

It is delightful to have questions like this burble up in your feed from the depths of time. (In this case, 2010.)

Congratulations, OP. You predicted Most Viewed Writers (Quora feature) and Top Writers (Quora program).

There will be different answers depending on who speaks the language, where, what the community attitudes are to it, and what kinds of resources you have access to.

One starting point is Kat Li’s answer to How can modern society preserve dying languages?

From Wikipedia, it seems Kumaoni is in the same category as a lot of languages in Indonesia: being spoken by millions of people, but they’re unlikely to pass it on, because everyone is switching to the national language.

The most obvious think you can do, as an 18-year old student:

• Use it.
• Use it with other people.
• Make Kumaoni language clubs, to make its use visible in university.
• Use it online. And that includes texting in it.
• Use it in ways that can enhance its prestige. You know how better than I can.
• And don’t get too precious about the purity of Kumaoni. A Kumaoni with a whole bunch of Hindi (or English) words in it is still better than no Kumaoni at all.

In 1300? That would make me Andronikos II Palaiologos.

Well, I’ve done the best I can with the Venetians and the Genoese. I’ve played them off each other, but I don’t have the money or the navy to get rid of them. I’ve done what I can with dynastic marriages as well. The Ottomans are starting to move on me, and I can only postpone the inevitable. Same goes for the Serbs. Hiring the Catalans certainly did not work out as a solution, but there’s a risk with any mercenary army.

There is one thing I can do though. Not just disown my grandson, Andronikos III Palaiologos. Have him blinded, the way my predecessors dealt with annoying relatives. The civil war between the two Androniki was where the fate of Byzantium was sealed.

Still, that would have likely only bought me a couple of decades. And Byzantium had a lot of lucky escapes over the following century, that it no longer deserved.

Is there a /h/ in aitch?

No?

Well, you won’t be surprised why someone thought it was a good idea to insert one, then. Every other letter names has something to do with the letter sound it represents. Even allowing for English orthography.

Uninformed speculation here in, and enthusiastic agreement with Jake Mannix (Vote #1: Jake Mannix’s answer to Does Quora have “survival plans” in place, in case its main staff is wiped out?)

Does Quora have contingency plans in place of hardware failure of disks? Yes, inasmuch as Amazon cloud servers do; if Amazon does not have backup and contingency plans in case of hardware failure, a whole lot of enterprises are screwed.

Does Quora have contingency plans in case of a massive natural disaster in Silicon Valley? The prudent thing for them to do is to have them, but with users not paying for the privilege, and with Quora not yet monetised, there would have been less incentive to do so—that kind of contingency costs money, after all.

Over and above what Jake says—which should be seared into every user’s brain here: recall that Quora does not allow the site to be spidered by archive.org, for fear of people not being able to delete their posts clear off the internet. So if Quora goes belly up, as many an unmonetised Silicon Valley startup has done, no, there is no contingency plan for the community.

As I say whensoever this issue comes up: read Brian Bi’s answer to When, and how, will I be able to download all of the Quora content I have produced, like the Facebook and Twitter feed export options?. And if you can’t run Python scripts yourself, find someone who can on your behalf.

Why did housewifery used to be pronounced uzzifrie, and now it’s pronounced house-wife-ree?

Well, let’s look at housewife itself. I’m looking up OED.

OED reports that the usual pronunciation in the second half of the 18th century of housewife, as given in pronunciation dictionaries, was /ˈhʌzwɪf/, huzzwiff, with its start matching hus-band (which has the same prefix). Often the w dropped off as well; cf. Warwick, Greenwich (hence huzzif); and the initial h would have dropped off in some dialects (hence uzzif, and uzzifry).

housewife started being pronounced like it is spelled, with an initial house, a bit later. hussy is a development of housewife (> hussif > hussy), and scholars suspect housewife changed to its modern pronunciation to differentiate it from hussy:

This diphthongal pronunciation became more common in sense 1 in the 19th cent. (it is either the preferred or the sole pronunciation in this sense in most late 19th-cent. pronouncing dictionaries), and is entirely predominant from the early 20th cent. onwards. While N.E.D. (1899) records the pronunciations (hɒ·zwif) /ˈhʌzwɪf/ and (hɒ·zif) /ˈhʌzɪf/ as frequent in sense 1 (and also records for the plural (hɒ·z(w)ivz) /ˈhʌzwɪvz/, /ˈhʌzɪvz/); D. Jones Eng. Pronouncing Dict. records /ˈhʌzɪf/ as ‘rare’ in this sense in 1917, and for the last time (as ‘old-fashioned’) in 1947; Webster (1934, 1961) gives it as still occasionally used in sense 1.

So the old pronunciation huzzif died out as late as the 1940s, though it was already marginal by 1860. housewifery would have followed the pronunciation of housewife.

Obviously the OP was looking for the word peer.

Quora expects members to report infractions against Quora’s policies, since they cannot detect all the infractions themselves. So yes to the letter of OP’s question.

The spirit of OP’s question, of course, by using the term “colleague”, is: should not group allegiance count against reporting to Quora? I have group allegiance to fellow Quorans who I see making good contributions, and there is a hell of a lot that Quora expects we report on, which I regard as at best chickenshit, and at worst specious. So yes, I empathise with what I suspect OP’s premise is.

That aside, I agree with Maura Rudd: see Maura Rudd’s answer to Is Quora encouraging a culture of reporting on one’s colleagues? If someone violates community norms egregiously, e.g. by issuing death or rape threats, by being insulting, or by spamming, then they are no peers of mine, and I am happy to dob them in.

(There are one or two respondents on this thread that I do not regard as peers, also, for their sneering attitude towards Quora as a community. )

I am also happy to make my own decision as to what counts as an infraction worth reporting. It’s not like Quora is paying me to enforce their standards.

It’s a good question, and a question that has been posed and discussed by many before.

• The history of Classical Greece is more interesting than that of other places, because it had more conflict and more players: it wasn’t a steady-state, stable empire. (That came later, with the successors of Alexander.) Of course, being more interesting does not correlate to being happier.
• The history of Classical Greece has gathered more interest, because its historians were read more; its historians were read more, in turn, because its culture was so fascinating to its successors. There’s nothing intrinsically more interesting about the Peloponnesian War than any number of other conflicts in antiquity—except that the Peloponnesian War had its Thucydides.
• A key reason Jared Diamond identified for the West gaining technological supremacy was that it was decentralised, featuring a lot of small states in competition with each other during the Renaissance. You can say the same about Classical Greece, and I’m sure people have: lots of small city-states, acting as different laboratories of government and culture and technology, promoting trade and cultural exchange because they were not self-sufficient, and competing with each other.
• When we think Classical culture, we mainly think Athens. Athens prevailed for a small time (but a critical time) because it got its own informal empire going, it was open to immigrants (though it did not grant them full civic rights), it had confidence in its power, and its dramatists and philosophers had enough leisure to ask tough questions. Athens did not come out of nowhere though: it built on centuries of both its own political experiments and others’. And remember that much of the science of Classical Greece came from Ionia, which was much more comfortable with the Persians.
• As I’ve said elsewhere, a major reason why the West finds Ancient Greek culture fascinating is that it traces its intellectual heritage back to Greece. It does so, because Rome does so. Rome did so, partly because of its direct contact with the Greek colonies in Italy, but also, and likely more so, because of its contact with the Greek Empires of Alexander’s successors, the Seleucids and Ptolemies and whoever it was that was running Greece. Politically, these empires were nothing to do with Athens and Sparta; but Athens and Sparta and Ionia is where they drew their culture from.