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Natural justice – Wikipedia

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Has Quora started getting rid of profile biographies after banning users?

I don’t post much here any more; it’s hard for me to get worked up about the missteps and the fumbles and the capriciousness. Plus, I’m endeavouring to be constructive in my criticisms. I have, after all, as Ari Fleischer once said, been “noted in the building”.

But I don’t want to hear about no “ooh, we respect banned users’ privacy” or “ooh, we want this to be a constructive site”. This is a straight out deprivation of natural justice.

The profile, as anyone edit-blocked knows, is the only means you have left to communicate when you’re banhammered. The profile is where the banned get to leave their farewells to the community. A farewell they have often earned. A farewell their peers often are entitled to.

And this has now been stripped of them.

I am offended.

Mehrdad is more of an expert about who Mehrdad is than I am: Mehrdad Dəmirçi’s answer to Who is Mehrdad Dəmirçi?

I can only answer with what I know:

• He is an Azeri Iranian.
• He is inquisitive.
• He has a subdued sense of humour.
• He asks me lots of A2As about Iranians, Azeris, Turks, and the context around them.
• I actually know very little about Iranians, Azeris, Turks, and the context around them, so I can’t often answer his A2As. But as a neighbour’s neighbour, I truly appreciate the questions, and sometimes I do try and give a well-thought out answer. (Even if they’re not always well-informed.)
• His surname (“Smith”) has the same etymology as that as the main fiddler of my home town, Γιάννης Δερμιτζάκης (“Dermidzo-yannis”: Yannis Dhermidzakis, Greek and Turkish for “John Smith”). So I feel I’ve already met him somewhere, and I expect him to be playing a Kemenche with sleighbells. (See: Cretan lyra)
• Oh, and he is a good looking man. I mean, seriously:

Lock up your daughters.

I have asked some OPs. It isn’t just tattoos, but it is mostly emblematic use. Mottos, gifts, that kind of thing. It’s not homework, or some guys at the Vatican stuck translating an encyclical.

And that’s cool. I appreciate the interest, and when I do answer questions like that, I make a point of trying to make it sound good.

More ancient Greek would be nice, though.

The explanation behind this is tied up with the bizarre history of the Traditional English pronunciation of Latin. I didn’t find an explicit explanation of what happened with species, and in fact the rules in that Wikipedia page took me in a slightly different direction to where I hoped to go.

But here goes. I apologise for fauxnetics in the following.

There are two rules at play here.

1. -i-es (which would originally have been pronounces like –yeez) gets merged into –es (pronounces –eez). Aries is pronounced identically to Ares; rabies is pronounced identically to rabes. Originally, they would have been pronounced Air-yeez, rabe-yeez.
2. An i before another vowel was pronounced as a semivowel (y): e.g. –ies = –yeez above. The combination sy ended up pronounced as sh. Russia > “Rusha”. Nation: na-si-on > na-syon > na-shon. Special: spe-si-al > spe-syal > spe-shal.

Now. If Rule number 1 gets applied to species before Rule 2, you get:

• spē-si-ēs
• spē-syēs
• spē-sēs (Rule 1: -ies > -es)
• = spee-seez. There is no place for Rule 2 to get applied: there’s no sy any more in the word.

If Rule number 2 gets applied to species before Rule 1, you get;

• spē-si-ēs
• spē-syēs
• spē-shēs (Rule 2: -si-e- > -sy-e- > -sh-e- )
• = spee-sheez. There’s no place for Rule 1 to get applied: there’s no -i-es any more in the word.

So there’s a timing conflict: if both rules were happening at the same time, it’s a matter of which rule got there first. And both pronunciations survived, because some speakers (or rather, some schools) applied one rule first to species, and other speakers (schools) applied the other rule first.

This kind of conflict btw is routine in historical linguistics; we refer to feeding vs bleeding rules (where a rule gets preempted by another rule).

Now, to me, spee-seez is a more posh pronunciation than spee-sheez. I don’t see an explanation for that here. I see something related in the pronunciation of ratio as ray-shyoe rather than ray-shoe: the -y- was put back in to reflect the spelling, as a hypercorrection. But if anything, that would suspect that spee-syeez > spee-sheez was the academic pronunciation, which doesn’t sound right to me.

So yes, English pronunciation is random, particularly English pronunciation of Latin. But it’s not inexplicable.

OK.

I may delete this answer, but to help out Ella González, I’d like to clarify what Tatiana’s post that Ella mentioned was all about. I do not think there is a direct relation between that and the blog being deleted.

Tatiana at Christmas time declared the annual truce on RAQ, inviting people to say what they liked about Quora. Tatiana added that she was concerned this past year, that people were starting to say they loathed Quora, or individual staff, or even her.

Tatiana’s more recent post was that she was concerned that a group of people, and one person in particular as the ringleader of that group, were not just criticising Quora in general, but making ad hominem attacks, @-mentioning and complaining against individual Quora staff. That was making it personal, she added, and those people were no longer welcome on the blog.

And she ended by saying that she was very worried that everyone else would take that to mean that they weren’t welcome on the blog either, and that this would mean noone would have the courage to post on the blog any more either.

I will not name any names, but I know who the purported ringleader is, and so does he. He does do what Tatiana says he does. He’d noticed some deletion activity around his RAQ posts days before, so he knew what was afoot. When the post was made, he commented to say that he acknowledged Tatiana’s request, and unsubscribed from the blog.

I also commented to the post, saying that I noted her point, and that I would never piss on the carpet in the blog that is Tatiana’s house.

I said that, because I have also said publicly that I am in sympathy with said ringleader. I do not choose to do what he does, but I do choose to be vocal about things I think are wrong, and to say I am not a fan of how Quora is managed.

Nothing in her post indicated that Tatiana was considering pulling the plug on the blog. And since the gripes kept coming in after it, nothing visibly corroborated her fear that her post had led to a chilling effect on the blog.

So whatever happened to RAQ, I believe that the post (by itself) wasn’t it.

Yeah, what the rest of you good people all said, Robert Todd and Amy Dakin and Humphry Smith. It’s correct; it’s dysfluent; and given the pedagogical context, it’s excusable.

That’s why I love podium-arts.com by our own Ioannis Stratakis. He doesn’t dwell on it and drag it out in his recitations, he just gets on with it. It was a real language, after all.

Myself, I think it really is that people expect everyone to be notified about their comments, when they are new to Quora.

Remember that, with no onboarding, it takes a little while for it to become apparent who gets notified of anything, to begin with. It took me a couple of weeks to realise that my comments three levels down would not be read by the original commenter.

I do it a fair bit. Sometimes to start a conversation, although that tends not to work that well. Sometimes because I’m having a discussion in comments, I’m asked a question, and I think it’s useful to get the answer out there. Less often, because I want to get some information out there of my own accord.

Quora policy says there’s nothing wrong with that, and I don’t think there is either. I own the answers, the community owns the questions. I might as well contribute to the community the questions that prompt good answers out of me.

As it turns out, I have read Christ Recrucified and Freedom and Death in Greek, and the Last Temptation and Zorba only in English, in Bien’s translation.

I have not read anyone else’s translation, so I can’t answer your A2A fully. The astonishing folksy stylistics of Kazantzakis are not going to come through in English. That’s actually just as well: an attempt to make them come through would be too distracting, as it is in translating Cavafy.

But from memory, Bien’s translation rang true to the spirit of the novels I had read in Greek. I recommend it.

Disclosure: my wife’s cousin is married to someone who works at Hrant Dik’s newspaper, and was in the office when he was killed. A painfully distressed look washed over him when it came up in Üsküdar.

Western Armenian: you mean it isn’t Turkish? Yeah, that surprised me too. I could hear all the aspirates, but the intonation really was indistinguishable for me from Turkish.

Eastern Armenian: This actually sounds a lot more like what little Western Armenian I’ve heard from my wife’s circle. Which is odd. Clearer consonants, much more distinctive ch’s.

Other than that…

Oh God, this is going to be so predictable. Can you predict this?

Pegah Esmaili can predict I’ll say this. And so can Mehrdad Dəmirçi. Because I’ve said this already about their language.

It sounds Persian. It’s the back a’s, and the easy flow of the intonation.