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My answer is not ultimately different to User-13249930999434776143’s. (Vote #1: User-13249930999434776143’s answer to Why is standard Albanian language based on the Tosk dialect and not the Gheg dialect?) But it is a bit less nuanced.

Albanian is divided into Tosk dialect in the south, and Geg dialect in the north.

The standard language of Albania before WWII was Southern Geg, based on the dialect of Elbasan. Elbasan Geg was close to the Tosk/Geg border, so it was a dialect that could serve as a middle point between Tosk and Geg. And while Elbasan was not the capital of the country, it was culturally prestigious. In other words, the choice of Elbasan Geg was a good choice of standard dialect, as these things go.

The postwar standard was not Southern Geg. It was Southern Tosk. So it was not a middle point of Tosk and Geg; it was at the extreme of dialects spoken within Albania. And it wasn’t spoken anywhere massively prestigious: it was spoken in places near the southern border of the country, like Vlorë and Korçë and Gjirokastër.

Postwar Albania was ruled by Enver Hoxha and his fellow partisans.

Enver Hoxha was born in?

That’s right. Gjirokastër.

It really is as simple as that.

By the time the communist regime fell, Southern Tosk had been entrenched in Albania as the standard language for a generation, and there was no move to restore the prewar standard. The most telling development for me was seeing Kosovo, which is Northern Geg, adopt Standard Albanian—based a dialect as far from the local dialect as you can get without ending up in the Arvanite diaspora. And Aziz Dida’s answer to my question Is there interest in keeping Geg as the standard language of Kosovo? shows, that has proven somewhat challenging for Kosovars.

EDIT: Death by standardization, a Gheg drama by User-13249930999434776143 on albanophilia. Drop everything, and read it.

There are two solutions:

1. Create an answer wiki, and have some poor schlubs index every incoming answer against some categories in the wiki, and ask that new answerers update it. That’s what the community has been doing.
2. Launch a hostile takeover of Quora Inc, hire new UX management, ban the ever-flowing page model as so, so 2010, and reintroduce paging. That scenario is currently restricted to my dreams. 🙂

One-liner, the question says?

OK then:

NOT: to share and grow the world’s knowledge. (Our Mission by Adam D’Angelo on The Quora Blog)

That’s a mission statement. Far be those from me.

NOT: a place to get answers to my questions.

Yishan Wong’s answer to Why are my questions not answered on Quora?: “Quora is not a place to get your question answered. […] 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.”

How do I explain Quora to outsiders?

I make no apology whatever for the fundamental disconnect between Quora’s notion of itself, and my own:

Facebook for smart people.

Originally Answered:

Why is the word colonel pronounced kernel?

Vote #2, Daniel Ross: Daniel Ross’ answer to Why is the word Colonel pronounced like kernel when there is no R in the word?

Vote #1 me, because I go a bit further. 🙂 I checked with OED.

So, the word started as colonnello in Italian.

The word became coronnel in French. Dissimilation, as Daniel points out. It’s also coronel in Spanish.

The word was borrowed into English in the 15th century as corronel. Pronounced with three syllables and an r.

In 1580, people started translating Italian military treatises into English, and spelling it as collonel.

Now, there were two pronunciations and two spellings in English of the word. The French corronel and the Italian collonel.

We reduced it down to one spelling by the 18th century. And we reduced it down to one pronunciation by the 18th century. And as too often happens in English, we use the one alternative in the spelling, and the other alternative in the pronunciation.

So, let’s ignore the spelling and stick to the pronunciation. I’ll add fauxnetics, with some disgust. According to dictionaries of English

• In 1710, it was /ˈkʌrəʊnɛl/ (currownell)
• In 1766, it was /ˈkɔːnɪl/ (cornill)
• In 1780 it was /ˈkɜːnɛl/ (curnell), the pronunciation it has now.
• In 1816, the older pronunciation (cor(o)nell with an o) was still around:
• “Both the English and Scottish, but particularly the latter, pronounce the word Coronel, and so do the Irish.” (C. James, New Military Dictionary)
• Some guy in 1825 spelled it phonetically as cawnel.

So what were the changes?

• Dissimilation of l to r, already back in French.
• Moving the stress from the last syllable (coronéll—it was French, after all) to córonell. That happened sometime in the 17th century, and it indicates the word being considered by English speakers as English now and not French.
• Dropping an unstressed syllable, coronell to cornell. Irregular in English, but it does happen. OED says that was first attested in 1669.
• The change that noone seems to talk about is cornell to curnell. That seems to me an assimilation of the vowels, from /kornel/ to /kernel/ (using fauxnemes): an /e/ before an /r/ is going to be pronounced as an /ɜ/. If English spelling was less silly, it would be kornell being respelled as kernell.

Because there used to be a taboo against swearing oaths by divine figures in Protestant England, and the taboo against oaths got conflated with the taboo against profanity, as Saying Bad Things.

In fact, that conflation also applies to oath:

the definition of oath

5. an irreverent or blasphemous use of the name of God or anything sacred.

So. MVW removed from profiles. Follows You tag removed from profiles.

What other subtle hints might Quora UI drop, that this is not a social network, and the individual profiles of answerers do not matter?

Assuming, of course, that…

Well, lookie here:

Highlighting of writer names? Gone today.

Message from Tom on his ban, relayed by his PMO:

Tom Higgins has been banned by Promethea on Promethea Updates

https://www.quora.com/api/mobile…

The Magister:

True. But should you forgive the recidivist seven times? Nay, verily, seventy times seven.

Alfredo Perozo:

Recidivist… what a woody-sounding Masiello Mega Word!

Recidivism – Wikipedia

Recidivism (/rᵻˈsɪdᵻvɪzəm/; from recidive and ism, from Latin recidīvus “recurring”, from re– “back” and cadō “I fall”) is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they had either experienced negative consequences of that behavior, or had been trained to extinguish that behavior. It is also used to refer to the percentage of former prisoners who are rearrested for a similar offense.

The term is frequently used in conjunction with criminal behavior and substance abuse. (Recidivism is a synonym for “relapse”, which is more commonly used in medicine and in the disease model of addiction.

The “plain English” synonym is “repeat offender”. But the Latin has the advantage of being derived from “fall”, as in “fall off the wagon” or “falling into sin”. And recidivism applies more generally than just the legal system; in the comment’s context, it really was about sin.

Depends on where and when, of course.

In Australia 40 years ago: almost never intermarried. In Australia now: often do intermarry; intermarriage exceeded 50% some time in the last ten years.

In Greece a century ago: almost never intermarried. There weren’t a lot of non-Greeks around to marry (depending on your definition of non-Greek, of course; I’m taking an expansive one). Now: less so.

Of course, that answer is a commonplace. More concretely: Greeks are by default endogamous in diasporas: they are rather attached to maintaining their cultural identity in the face of what they see as an external threat. Unusually so, compared with other migrant groups.

That gets mitigated by various interrelated factors.

• Size of settlement: small Maniat settlements in Italy in the 17th century assimilated rather readily.
• Local authority figures: the colony in Corsica did not assimilate in the critical first two generations, because they had a monasteryful of monks and several chieftains with them, urging them to stay Greek Orthodox.
• Time: the second generation of Greek Australians didn’t intermarry; the third did.
• Sense of threat: the Greeks that migrated from Corsica and Mani to New Smyrna Beach, Florida were a minority of the settlers; the majority were Minorcans (especially once malaria got the Maniots). In New Smyrna, it was the Minorcans and the Greco-Corsicans against the cruelty of Andrew Turnbull. In Corsica, the Greeks were at constant war with the Catholic Corsicans for another three generations; in Florida, the same Greeks intermarried with the Minorcans immediately. The Minorcans weren’t the threat any more; the English were.