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Changes to Trending Topics by Abhinav Sharma on Quora Product Updates

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.

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.

Vote #1, Daniel Ross: Daniel Ross’ answer to Has a proto-language ever been accurately constructed prior to discovery of a historical text in said proto-language?

Vote #2, Brian Collins: Brian Collins’ answer to Has a proto-language ever been accurately constructed prior to discovery of a historical text in said proto-language?

I’ll add that Linear B is similar to Hittite: it is closer to proto-Greek than anything we had, and it was deciphered after proto-Greek (and proto-Indo-European) was reconstructed. It has the digammas of proto-Greek, and it was the labiovelars of proto-Greek…

… except, it’s actually the other way around. If we didn’t have proto-Greek as a guide, we wouldn’t have been able to decipher Linear B. The syllabary was utterly unknown to us, and we have no independent corroboration, save for the odd pictograph that cracked the puzzle (tiripode = tripod). So it’s not like Linear B was as much of an independent corroboration of proto-Greek as we might like.

Quora’s answer to What does it mean to be verified on Quora? What are verified profiles? How does Quora verify accounts?

To add to Vivek Joshy’s answer:

Quora is also clearly marking questions as “needing improvement” based on a grammar bot. The grammar bot has a better command of grammar than many people.

But not better than all people. The grammar bot has a somewhat… limited understanding of grammar, and I have found myself randomly rearranging punctuation and capitalisation, to get things past it. Linguistic questions, with words being cited for discussion, are particularly difficult for it to handle: do use italics.

As for Vivek’s contention that:

It would only do this type of moderation if it is very sure that the question is of that type.

Well… that has not been my experience.

There is in fact an army of people looking at Quora content (Trusted Reporting (Quora feature)), but they’re looking for BNBR and such violations. The ability of users to mark questions as needing improvement (by adding the topic “Needs Improvement” has been taken away:

• Elimination of Topic-Based Moderation by Jay Wacker on Quora Product Updates
• Christopher VanLang’s answer to Why do the Quora moderators allow a broken algorithm to decide if a question or answer needs improvement, rather than do it themselves?

There’s a spectrum between conventionalised and artificial, and Sanskrit is somewhere along that spectrum. Specialists other than myself can answer better than I as to how artificial Sanskrit is.

We have no idea how old the Aboriginal initiate language Damin is, and therefore whether it is older than Sanskrit or not. It is clearly much further along the artificial axis than Sanskrit is, although it is still based on the Aboriginal vernacular language Lardil. (Read about it: it really is an astonishing language.)

Arguendo, let’s accept your premisses:

Everybody expects non native speakers to know English and speak it fluently and hate them for not doing so. Also this language is invading all other ones.

That wouldn’t make English fascist, and using a loaded term like that inaccurately means people won’t take your argument seriously. (And that’s not a “native speaker” bias: the same objection would apply in any language that has borrowed the term to refer to a particular political ideology exemplified by Mussolini.)

To use my favourite term at the moment, as defined by one of the victims of Mussolini’s fascism:

That would make English hegemonic.

And there’s no malice to hegemony. It’s the stuff of the Melian Dialogue: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.

I am considering it, for the reasons given in Nick Nicholas’ answer to How will the upcoming changes to how anonymity is implemented (March 2017) impact your Quora experience?

I have to weigh up the sensitivity of the answers, versus the impossibility of ever engaging with anyone over them. Then again, precisely because of the subject matter, I’ve had minimal engagement anyway. So I will likely remain anonymous on them.

From someone I used to hang out with on IRC. (Yes, I am that old.)

“Nick Nicholas! You wouldn’t be half as obnoxious as you are if you weren’t called that!”

Um… I thank you, and my three cousins called Nick Nicholas also thank you?

High school frenemy (well, friend in high school, because I didn’t know any better back then) is in my office a decade later, visiting. I’ve just concluded a call with the French embassy, trying to recover a computer for a staff member in the department, while my frenemy waited.

“Well. That was surprisingly professional.”

Um, say that in my office, will you. Yeah, sod off.