Originally Answered:

What is your favorite verse of scripture in The Holy Bible and why?

For linguistic reasons, Mark 16:4, referring to the stone being rolled away from the tomb:

ἦν γὰρ μέγας σφόδρα.

For [the stone] was fiercely huge.

It’s easy to lose sight in translation of how colloquial Mark is.

For stylistic reasons, 1 John 1–3, an avalanche of relative clauses crashing into each other, and sometimes onto the reader:

Ὃ ἦν ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς, ὃ ἀκηκόαμεν, ὃ ἑωράκαμεν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν, ὃ ἐθεασάμεθα καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν, περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς— καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἐφανερώθη, καὶ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ μαρτυροῦμεν καὶ ἀπαγγέλλομεν ὑμῖν τὴν ζωὴν τὴν αἰώνιον ἥτις ἦν πρὸς τὸν πατέρα καὶ ἐφανερώθη ἡμῖν—ὃ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ ἀκηκόαμεν ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν, ἵνα καὶ ὑμεῖς κοινωνίαν ἔχητε μεθ’ ἡμῶν· καὶ ἡ κοινωνία δὲ ἡ ἡμετέρα μετὰ τοῦ πατρὸς καὶ μετὰ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.

The Turks are the Neighbours. The Iranians are… the Neighbours’ Neighbour. Greeks have not have much direct contact with Iranians since the Turks moved in between the Persians and the Byzantines. They are aware of Iranians, but not closely. For all that we had well over a millennium of cultural contact with the Persians, that ended a millennium ago.

In fact, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the cultural commonalities I’ve discovered with Iranians, both in my twenties when I had Iranian fellow linguistics students, and latterly on Quora. (The emphasis is on: surprise.)

Stand back everyone, I’ll handle this one. 🙂

The Sarakatsani are traditionally nomadic shepherds in Northern Greece and Bulgaria, who speak Greek. Their origins have excited interest, because the Vlachs are traditionally nomadic shepherds through the southern Balkans, who speak Aromanian, and there has been speculation about whether the two populations are related.

The most complete study of Saraktsan dialect I know of is Carsten Høeg’s PhD Thesis, Les Saracatsans: Une Tribu Nomade Grecque. I: Étude Linguistique. Paris: Edouard Champion. 1925. His fieldwork was done in 1922 in Papingo, near the Greek–Albanian border, but the also visited Macedonia and Thessaly, and thought that the Sarakatsan of all three areas was very similar.

Høeg, and almost all other scholars cited in Wikipedia, believe the Sarakatsani are not hellenised Vlachs. Their dialect has Aromanian loanwords to deal with pastoralism, and the words for “uncle” and “father”, but their dialect does not have any grammatical features that look like Aromanian. He contrasts their language with that of the Kopachars, a group of linguistically hellenised Vlachs, whose language has much clearer signs of Aromanian influence.

At the end of the book, Høeg gives a list of loanwords. The largest list is Latin and Italian, and there are not many surprises there. There’s more Slavic and Albanian than I recognised, but as I found in exchanges with Dimitra Triantafyllidou, that applies to Northern Greek in general. There’s about as much Aromanian as Slavic, and the list is not overwhelming:

• αλαμπούμπουρδα, βετούλι, βίτσα, βλάχος, γκαβός, γκέσο, γκόρμπο, γκουργκόλια, γκουργκούτσια, γριμπός, ζούρα, κανούτο, κάτσινο, κλιάστρα, κόλλα, κρεπιτούρα, λάλας, μανάρι, μηλιόρα, μίγγος, μοαμπέτι, μούργκος, μπάλιο, μπάρτζο, μπάτσος, μπούκα, μπουμπούκι, μπουμπουνίζει, μπουσουλώ, μπούτινα, μπράσκα, σαρμανίτσα, σιγκούνι, στουρνάρι, τάτας, τσιντζιά, τσιπούνι (?), φλέτουρα, φλετουρώ, φλώρο, χαζός. pell-mell, one year old goat, rod, Vlach, blind, chalk, black, pebbles/potatoes, ?, curved, stain, grey goat, orange-faced sheep, colostrum, sheet of paper, boulder, uncle, lamb fattened for slaughter, one year old ewe, ?, entertainment (< moabete < Turkish mühabbet), dark grey, animal with a white spot an a black head, goat with a ruddy brown head, slap?, jaw, bud, thunder, crawl, butter churn, toad, cradle, woollen coat, flint, daddy, ?, overcoat, butterfly, to fly, white, stupid.
• Høeg does not define all of these in Vol I which I have, and I was helped out by http://karditsas.blogspot.com.au…

Høeg regards Sarakatsan as an independent branch of Northern Greek dialect, not closely related to the dialects of their sedentary neighbours—which therefore proved to him that they were not “recently embarrassed villagers”, as the Sarakatsani themselves preferred to believe, but longtime nomads.

EDIT:

Høeg does list 13 particularities of Sarakatsan:

• Consonants softening before s, l: Kostakis > Kushtaks
• Deletion of /v/ in provato “sheep”: prota, pratina
• Stressed /e/ becomes /æ/
• Use of tun as a nominative clitic: pu tun ini (Standard Greek πού ’ν’ τος)
• Pronouns aftinus, ikyos (Standard αυτός, εκείνος)
• ña, miña (Standard μια)
• θana (Standard θα)
• Columnar stress in verbs: ˈkaθumasti (Standard καθόμαστε)
• 1st sg verb ending in -ú (buˈru, Standard μπορώ)
• Conjugation aniw, anijs, anij, animi, aniti, anin (Standard ανοίγω, ανοίγεις, ανοίγει, ανοίγουμε, ανοίγετε, ανοίγουν)
• Passive of contracted verbs –jomi, -josi, -joti, -jomasti, -josti, -jondi; e.g. aɣapjoti (Standard αγαπιέται)
• 2nd pl imperfect and aorist active –itan, e.g. ˈmaθitan (Standard μάθατε)
• 1st sɡ imperfect passive –man, 2nd –san: ˈkaθuman, ˈkaθusan (Standard καθόμασταν, καθόσασταν)

One further peculiarity is accenting of the vocative particle o, and the lack of accent on the following name: ώ μανα, ώ Κωστα “Oh mother, Oh Kostas”.

I didn’t find any clear archaisms.

I draw your attention to:

Quora Moderation — Election Season PSA by Marc Bodnick on The Quora Moderation Blog

Disrespectful insults and attacks are not allowed against:

• Democrats or Republicans generally
• Any of the presidential candidates
• Any other politician

No attacks / insults in comments, answers, or questions. No rhetorical questions making political attacks.

I also draw your attention to the baffled responses from many commenters; e.g.

https://moderationupdates.quora….

Is it a new policy or an interpretation of an existing one (which one)? Is it an extension of BNBR to public figures? Or is it an extension of the TOS clause that prohibits libel?

Is it an exception specific to US Politics and “election season”, or should people in other continents also take heed? Should Europeans talking about Merkel and Tsipras, or Indians discussing Modi and Kerjiwal take heed? What about Putin?

And what do you define as an “attack”? Criticism of the political stance of public figures ,no matter how harsh, is in the essence of democratic discourse. So is ridicule (parody, political cartoons, etc). Are you referring to ad-hominem attacks? If I say: “Candidate X is a crony of big business.” or “Candidate Y is corrupt.” or “Candidate Z is an idiot running on his daddy’s name.”, will I be running afoul? But what if these are exactly my arguments about why people should not vote for them?

And what have you seen that makes you feel the need to post this, especially since this isn’t the first election that Quora has gone through since 2010?

And Bodnick’s responses

No change in policy. We insist on civility so that people of all political persuasions feel that the environment is safe. I’ve posted many times along these lines.

Nope. We’ve talked about this many times in the past. The point is less about “BNBR applies to politicians” and more, we want people of all political persuasions to feel safe writing on Quora and attacky/insulting content often has a chilling effect on people whose views are similar to the target’s.

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Assuming that Bodnick, who was still a Quora employee at that time, was speaking as one: BNBR does not apply just to other members but to anyone on the planet, and “attacky/insulting content” violates BNBR. Whether or not Trump is a member of Quora is irrelevant.

Of course this interpretation of BNBR has not been consistently applied on this site. I’d go further and say, I don’t think applying this interpretation of BNBR consistently is even feasible.

I did get a BNBR for calling ex-Prime Minister Abbott of Australia an idiot. At least, I *think* that’s what I got it for; it might have been for saying Wahhabism led to the destruction of archaeological sites by ISIS instead. It’s very hard to tell what you get a BNBR for.

OSX: OS X Yosemite: Use input sources to type in other languages

Windows 2000/XP/7: Adding & Enabling Greek Language

As Names of the Greeks – Wikipedia details, the name that the Byzantines gave themselves, and the name that Modern Greeks traditionally gave themselves as a result, was Romans: Romioi, with Hellene reserved for the Ancient Greeks (or for pagans in general).

It follows that the name Greeks traditionally gave their vernacular was Roman, Romeika, with Hellenic reserved for Ancient Greek. And this term entered 18th and 19th century English as Romaic.

In fact this book written in 1855 explicitly contrasts Romaic and Modern Greek: Romaic and Modern Greek. Romaic is what Greeks called Demotic, the spoken language; “Modern Greek” is what Greeks called Katharevousa, the diglossic written language.

Romaic passed out of usage by the end of the 19th century in English, as Demoticism gained ground and as Greeks grew uncomfortable with anything Greek being called anything but Greek. Romeika is obsolete now in Greek too, though many will still remember when people used to say “am I speaking Romaic to you?!” (same meaning as “English, m*thaf*cka, do you speak it?”). That’s “am I speaking Hellenic [Greek] to you?!” now, of course.

For the same reasons presented at Tatiana Estévez’s answer to Why does Quora delete all questions pertaining to the ban of Quora users?

It would be seen by Quora as violating BNBR, and it would be seen by Quora as embarrassing to writers. The scenario brought up recurrently by Quora moderators is the writer going for a job interview, and the prospective employers having Googled ahead the writer’s activity on Quora.

More frequent? No. But certainly very noticeable!

The second and first aorists are equivalents of the strong and weak verbs of Germanic. Strong verbs and second aorists form their past tense by ablaut, vowel change. Weak verb and first aorists form their past tense by suffix. The older pattern is the ablaut; the newer and more frequent pattern is the suffixation. There’s more second aorists in Homer than in Attic.

As the new pattern generalises, the verbs that hold out in the old pattern the longest are very frequent verbs, which are quite entrenched in people’s memories, and people don’t feel as compelled to simplify. So εἶδον “I saw”, ἔβαλον “I put”, ἦλθον “I came”. Have a look at this list of frequent second aorists in the New Testament: Second Aorist

And the second aorist was stone dead by Early Modern Greek, but it did in fact enjoy a resurgence in the Koine, particularly with passives in the Septuagint. βασταγῆναι for example instead of βασταχθῆναι. Cf. Modern US English dove for dived: Dove vs. dived – Grammarist

Your fellow hardcore Romanophobes already have. Roman Empire has already had the following topics merged in:

• (Merged from Byzantium)
• (Merged from Byzantine Empire)
• (Merged from Byzantine)
• (Merged from Byzantine History)

The lack of any East Roman Empire topic is… not helpful, and it’s probably too much work now to introduce one.

Byzantines is the one remaining topic that allows us to narrow down anything between 330 and 1453. We could rename Byzantines to East Roman Empire, but the real work to be done is to unmerge Byzantine Empire, even if it means renaming it East Roman Empire, to placate Romanophobes. And the merger has been there for a while: it would need a lot more retagging.

Obviously, Vote #1/#2 Daniel Slechta’s answer to Could emoticons form the script of a new constructed language? and Daniel Ross’ answer to Could emoticons form the script of a new constructed language?

(I disagree with Daniel Ross’ first point, that the emoji must be conventional and not iconic for them to be a language at all. I think the real issue is his second point, that icons can only go so far.)

(I will hold my tongue about Esperanto diacritics, because I otherwise like Daniel. ;^)

See also: Could emojis ever replace written language? Why or why not?

My concern, as expressed in that question, is what your verbs and syntax are going to look like, if your emoji-based language is not going to be just some rebus—or, as Daniel Slechta argues, extremely restricted in what it can talk about.

The challenge has been addressed in an actual symbol-based universal constructed language, Blissymbols. But I don’t think anyone would argue that Blissymbols’ verbs are intuitive.