Category: Uncategorized

English: Bee Em Double You.

Australian English: Beamer.

Greek: well, Greek only referenced English as its default foreign language in the last generation. So it’s the German pronunciation: Beh Em Veh. (Μπε εμ βε)

Cypriot Greek: from memory, Pemve (Πεμβέ) —/b/ is rendered in Cypriot Greek as /p/, since Cypriot Greek has a three way contrast of /ᵐb p pʰ/.

1. Lurk in a topic for a little while. Go through the list of most viewed writers, and check whether they look like they know what they are talking about.
2. When you A2A, go to the View More menu, then go to the relevant topic, and pick not the first people that come up, but the names you recognise as knowing what they talk about, and failing that, the names with the most answers in the topic.
3. You can’t find a relevant topic? Then for pity’s sake, go back and tag the right topics on the question. That’s actually step 0.

Poem #1

My favourite Esperanto sonnet—which actually dissolves the very form of the sonnet; see:

What is your favorite phrase or line from a poem not in English?

Mi, dezirante ĉerkon
(kapitulaci,
ekshipokrito laca,
ĉi ŝakan ŝercon),

pluportis mian serĉon
ĝis la palaco
de ĉi korpo kuraca,
en kies riĉon

mi kitelumas
pli pace miajn ostojn
ol feton lulas

la utero; kaj ekson
mian ĝi teksas
en naskon.

I, wishing for a coffin
(to quit,
a tired ex-hypocrite,
this joke of chess),

continued my search
until the palace
of this healing body,
in whose riches

I besmock
my bones more peacefully
than the womb lulls

the fetus; and it weaves
my expiration
into birth.

Vocaroo | Voice message

Poem #2

You want obscure? Here’s obscure.

Petrarchan sonnets, written in Cypriot Greek in the mid-16th century. ΟΙ ΡΙΜΕΣ ΤΗΣ ΑΓΑΠΗΣ: ΜΑΣΑΙΩΝΙΚΑ ΕΡΩΤΙΚΑ ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΚΥΠΡΟΥ – THE RIMES OF LOVE: EROTIC MEDIEVAL SONGS OF CYPRUS

I don’t pay much tribute to my father’s, Cypriot side of the family: I wasn’t brought up there, I wasn’t passed on much of it. Apart from a very slight Cypriot accent in my otherwise Cretan- and English-flavoured Greek. So, to my Cypriot peers here: please accept this, by means of apology.

Vocaroo | Voice message

11.

Κοιμώντα μού φανίστην να βιγλίσω
εκείνην απού πήρεν την καρδιάμ μου,
με θάρος να μου στρέψη την υγειάν μου
κ’ εγώ να ’λπίζω μέσα μου να ζήσω·

αμμέ, με δίχως περισσά ν’ αργήσω,
ξυπνώντα ποίκα στρέμμα στην κυράμ μου·
εδίπλασα ξανά την καματιάμ μου
και πάλε πεθυμώ να ξηψυχήσω.

Μμάτια μου, αφόν κοιμώντα μού διδείτε
το ’θελα να θωρούσετε αννοιμένα,
τον κόσμον πιον γι’ αγάπημ μου μεδ δήτε.

Μμάτια μου, αφόν βιγλάτε κοιμισμένα
κείνον που θέλω πάντα να θωρήτε,
μείνετε μέραν νύχταν καμμυμένα.

As I slept, I thought I saw
her who has taken my heart,
with the expectation that she would turn my health around
and the hope inside that I would yet live.

So without much delay,
I woke and turned around to find my lady;
I doubled then again my sorrow
and I wish to breathe my last once more.

My eyes, since you grant me as I sleep
what I wish you could see when you are open,
then for my sake look no more upon the world.

My eyes, since you see while sleeping
what I wish you could keep watching forever,
then stay shut, night and day.

I can corroborate Kathleen Grace: if you don’t hear back on an appeal within two weeks, it has been rejected.

Of course, I disagree radically with her about whether non-response is constructive customer service, or whether a one-line “you have violated BNBR” really helps you work out what the hell just happened in your 6 para answer. But there you go.

I have had two Spam notices and two benburrs (h/t Gigi J Wolf) within a month in December, after 15 months with no action. The Spam notices were both appealed successfully. Interestingly, one of the Spam notices must have been mislabelled; I didn’t even remember what the comment was, and on seeing it it seems to have been… BNBR against a former prime minister. Or ISIS.

The two BNBR appeals (one of which I’ve posted about at The Insurgency) have been unanswered, so presumed rejected.

Thank you again, Habib le toubib, for a thought provoking question about my experience here. I don’t want to spend all my time answering Questions about Quora on Quora, but you really do get to the nub with these.

I was touched to see people close to me answering this, and having an experience pretty close to mine. Sam Murray, John Gragson, Michael Masiello, Clarissa Lohr, Kittie Eubank, Jordan Yates, Michael Koeberg, Habib Fanny, McKayla Kennedy, Heather Jedrus, Elke Weiss, Yonatan Gershon. It’s like one of those “I love youse all” cartoons I keep drawing (with some future members).

A lot of what I’ll say will overlap, but this is a survey question.

• Like the Magister said, I no longer differentiate my new followers; I’m sorry, there are already too many of them. I feel bad about that, but it is what it is.
• I have become extremely picky now about following new people. I want to keep it to a manageable size: I can’t keep it as low as the Right number determined through primate research (150, as Michaelis Maus has pointed out somewhere), but I am trying to get not too far above 300.
• Jordan commented somewhere that she spends a minute, when she gets followed by someone new, to see if they’re worth following back. I used to spend that amount of time, when I read that answer by her: read some answers, check their tenor. Not any more. It’s 5 seconds now: topics I care about? No? Next.
• If you keep upvoting me and commenting at me, I will notice you. But not at the outset. I’m sorry.
• The intimacy has gone, as others have noted too. I am interacting with a much broader range of people, and I’m happy to. But I miss the time when it was just three middle aged Hellenophiles against the world 🙂 .
• My post It feels hollower by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile was mostly about how disgusted I was at how Sierra Spaulding had been treated here. But I alluded to something else in it: the start of me becoming “popular”, and how it felt like selling out.

Quora has been even less the same for me this past month, as the two voices I have come to cherish the most here, Michael Masiello’s and Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s, have been stilled—Dimitra because she actually has stuff in real life to deal with, Michael because he was shut down, and so were his friends.

To be brutal, having my friends out of my feed has allowed me to connect with new voices; the feed is harsh like that. But it hasn’t felt the same for me. I mean no insult to those I’ve started following the past month; there’s a reason I have, and I look forward to getting to know them even better. But it feels hollower for me here.

• Many more A2As, and much less of a chance to go finding questions on my own. I prefer questions I find, as I pondered at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you feel differently about A2A questions, compared to questions you find on your own? And sometimes the A2A backlog depresses me. (I’m also not aggressive enough at culling it.)
• I haven’t accepted the pressure to be more careful about what I upvote: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are you more careful about what you upvote/comment on answers because your followers will see it in their feed? The issue has come up; it may have cost me a friend, and it’s under discussion with someone else in PM right now. I’ve made my call though.
• A hell of a lot more time spent on comments and PM, much less time spent on answers, and much less time spent on learning from others. I am starting to have notifications turned on for those closest to me, so I don’t miss their stuff. And there are days I don’t make it to the feed at all.

Like the others said. There is a split between American accents and Commonwealth accents, with American often more archaic; the retention of r after vowels is the biggest shibboleth (and several British and Irish accents line up with America there). The Australian accent is pretty close to London English, though apparently there was a Midlands influence too.

What is halfway between British and American is not the accent in Australia, but the spelling, and increasingly the vocabulary. We spell jail not gaol, for example, and you will hear more and more US-specific words. As much as anything, that’s media and globalisation.

Don’t know Emily. I posted her on Necrologue when notified of her banning, and asked her friend to convey my regrets, as I regret any ban.

The general argument I will address is, should sock-puppetting be zero-tolerance, or should there be the possibility of cutting users some slack?

1. I know people who have “accidentally” (in fact, no-quotes accidentally) created second accounts, and appealed their ban successfully. I know people who have no-quotes accidentally created second accounts, and were permabanned.
2. The proportion of people being banned for sockpuppetting—including longstanding, very popular Quora Users—is astounding. Don’t risk it, people. They will find you, and they will nuke you.
3. Quora’s onboarding is execrable. No, strike that, it would be execrable if it even existed. People have to go looking, to find out what a big deal sockpuppetting is to moderation.
4. Myself, I think sockpuppetting is a far lesser issue than trolling and threats, just as I am unconvinced that Real Name insistence actually achieves much of anything. But that’s my opinion, I don’t run Quora, and neither do you guys.

Assuming for the sake of argument that Emily sockpuppetted inadvertently, at least initially—which is what is being said here.

• The arguments for bringing Emily back are: precedent (there have been successful appeals), corporate responsibility of Quora for poor onboarding, and, well, mercy. Which should be a part of any justice system. Take the circumstances into account, take the likelihood to reoffend, allow the person some good character references. Cut the kid some slack. She won’t do it again. She didn’t mean to.
• The arguments against bringing Emily back are: consistency (Quora can’t be seen to be playing favourites), clarity (those are the rules, no exceptions), and what Marc Bodnick once delightfully called the “rule-bound” nature of Quora Moderation (or something like that): apply rules absolutely, without wiggle-room, so that moderators (including subcontractors and bots) don’t have to expend an inordinate amount of time on decisions.

I know which side I’m on. I can see which side Quora is likely to be on. But I’m laying out the reasoning on both sides as I see it.

For Greek, I’d say γαμώτο, which is Mediaeval Greek for “fuck it!” (The Modern Greek is το γαμώ). See Nick Nicholas’ answer to What’s the best translation of the intensifier “the fuck” in other languages?, with further erudite syntactic discussion thereof.

See also Nick Nicholas’ answer to How do you say swear words in Greek?, although they are not swear phrases (as in, expressions of anger). “To my balls” στ’ αρχίδια μου and “To my dick” στον πούτσο μου (meaning, “I have contempt for you”) are pretty popular, and I was delighted to find the former is shared with Turkish and Azeri.

Natural Language Processing is locked.

Fell upon Arabic NLP. A bit niche, but ok. Tried to make it child of Natural Language Processing. Failed.

Should the topic deprecate in favour of Arabic (language) + Natural Language Processing? Or should it stand, and have a bunch of child topics? It only has 5 followers and 2 questions.

The ball got rolling, as Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching – Wikipedia notes, in the early Renaissance, a generation before Erasmus. Erasmus published the system that prevailed in the West since, and that was a closer approximation of the modern reconstruction than Modern Greek pronunciation was:

The study of Greek in the West expanded considerably during the Renaissance, in particular after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when many Byzantine Greek scholars came to western Europe. At this time, Greek texts were universally pronounced using the medieval pronunciation which survives intact to the present day.

From about 1486, various scholars (notably Antonio of Lebrixa, Girolamo Aleandro, and Aldus Manutius) judged that this pronunciation appeared to be inconsistent with the descriptions handed down by ancient grammarians, and suggested alternative pronunciations. This work culminated in Desiderius Erasmus’ dialogue De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione (1528). The system propounded in this work is called the Erasmian pronunciation.

The pronunciation described by Erasmus is very similar to that currently regarded by most authorities as the authentic pronunciation of Classical Greek (notably the Attic dialect of the 5th century BC). However Erasmus did not actually use this pronunciation himself.

The Modern reconstruction was informed by more close reading of the ancient authorities, internal reconstruction, better knowledge of ancient dialects through inscriptions, and comparative historical linguistics. Once you look at the comparisons of Greek with Sanskrit and Latin, the reconstruction becomes pretty obvious.