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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.

Cypriot Greek is one of the South-Eastern group of Greek dialects, along with Chios and the Dodecanese. So the differences between the Greek of Rhodes (in Greece) and the Greek of Cyprus are less far apart than the Greek of Athens and the Greek of Cyprus. In fact, if you aren’t finely attuned to the dialects, you can mistake someone from Rhodes as someone from Cyprus; that has happened to my dad in taxis in Crete.

But I’m going to assume the question is about Standard Greek vs Cypriot Greek. These are the first things that come to mind:

• Survival of word-final -n.
• Survival and expansion of double consonants. That includes word-initially (usually in loanwords from Turkish), where they are realised as aspirates.
• Deletion of voiced fricatives between vowels; so Standard Greek traɣuði “song”, Cypriot trauin.
• Fortition of θj, ðj to θc. So Standard ðia(v)ole “Devil!”, Cypriot θcaole.
• Palatalised velars become palatoalveolar (though that actually happens in most Greek dialects outside the standard).
• Some archaic verb inflections.
• Old French loanwords; e.g. tʃaera “chair”.
• Impressionistically, a few more Turkish loanwords than in Greece.
• Unmarked VSO word order instead of SVO.
• A deep love of cleft constructions. I have cited in a paper the phrase from a folk tale ίνταλος εν ποννα εύρω τωρά να γινώ γιατρός “How is it that I will work out now how to become a doctor”.
• A healthy survival of the dialect as the low lect in a diglossia; there is abundant Cypriot dialect written online, including dialect-specific ASCII romanisation.

Btw, I’ve just discovered that Google matches dialectal ίνταλος with Standard πώς in searches. I am impressed!

EDIT: Added by Eutychius Kaimakkamis:

• The -n at the end of words is usually pronounced when it’s the ending word. When there’s another word after it, the -n just nasalizes the vowel behind it and by extension the consonant or vowel next to it.
• In many varieties (mainly in Tillyria and Kokkinochoria), θ and φ sometimes change to χ e.g. χαρκούμαι instead of θαρκούμαι or χιλούιν instead of φιλούιν. Sidenote: There’s even a satirical show with a a segment called “Τα άπλυτα στη χόρα” (instead of φόρα) where two football pundits talk with exaggerated Kokkinochoria accents and usually involves (poor quality) scatological humour like “να σου χέσω ένα χέμα” instead of “να σου θέσω ένα θέμα”.
• Voiced consonants often turn into unvoiced ones e.g. φτέλλα instead of βδέλλα or αυκό instead of αυγό.

The Latin plural is specimina. specimina – Wiktionary reports it as an alternative to specimens, but I have never seen it used. The examples it gives are from a 1949 textbook on colour perception.

It’s doubtful the Greek population of Melbourne ever exceeded 300k; and the more Greeks assimilate, the harder that is to count. I think it could be argued that Chicago had a larger Greek population at least at one point. Thessalonica has a population over a million, so Melbourne was never the largest Greek city outside of Athens.

There was the occasional random Greek in Australia as far back as the 1820s. A discernible community in Melbourne dates from the 1890s (about 150 strong), and the first Greek church in Melbourne, the Church of the Annunciation, opened in 1901. Back then, the community was from a small number of Greek islands—Kalymnos, Ithaca, Kastellorizo, with one family member bringing another. Kalymnos and Kastellorizo were sponge diver islands, and diving was an initial source of employment for Greeks in Australia. (Hence the pearling houses of Paspaley and Kailis in Broome.)

The upsurge of the Greek population in Melbourne, and the rest of Australia for that matter, dates from 1950–1975, and was the result of mass migration of Greeks from impoverished post-war Greece (and in lesser numbers, Cyprus, Turkey and Egypt), to work in the factories and then small businesses of Australia. In my family, the earliest family member, my uncle George, came out to work as a carpenter in Sale in 1947; the latest family member was my uncle Andrew, who joined my father working in the fish ’n’ chip shop business in 1970.

Unlike the Italians, Greeks avoided becoming farmers in Australia, and stuck to the cities; for that reason, there was a healthy presence of Italians in rural Queensland, but the Greek population was heavily concentrated in the capital cities of each state. By far most Greeks ended up in Sydney and Melbourne; as of the 2011 census (Greek Australians), 30,000 people in NSW were born in Greece, and 50,000 in Victoria.

Melbourne was at the time the industrial powerhouse of Australia, and it needed factory fodder; that was one drawcard for early migrants, and I assume is what gave it the edge over Sydney. As with many other diasporas (and as indeed with the earlier Greek migration wave), family members brought other family members, and critical mass of the diaspora encouraged other Greeks to join it, as familiar territory. (The current Greek Financial Crisis wave of migration is conspicuous in Oakleigh, the current Melbourne Greektown, for both reasons.)

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.