Category: Uncategorized

This is intertwined with:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your most overrated Quora answer?

…

When I wrote Nick Nicholas’ answer to How many states can you identify on the Map of India? (which I did not do great in), Shashank Nayak smirked to me:

Prepare to hit the Indian upvote lottery!.

Nah, that’s just silly, I answered:

… The Indian *downvote* lottery, surely…

Of course, that answer did not hit the Indian upvote lottery. That would indeed be silly.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which Indian states are well known in other countries? did instead. Which was a repackaging of the same answer, minus one or two states I knew through unconventional avenues (Nagaland).

In the past two weeks: 112k views, 670 upvotes, and some horrific number of digest forwards.

How do I feel about it? Well, how I felt about my previous most popular answers (which were about Quora Moderation decisions) (why yes, one of those questions has indeed since been deleted) was:

I am proud of those answers. But I don’t think I’m 5 times more proud of those answers, than I am of the questions where I try to work out a historical linguistic puzzle from first principles…

This one? I’m certainly not 50 times more proud. I’m not even as proud of it as I am of those moderation question answers. It was just a trifle.

Meh.

Now that was surprising.

I thought I heard clear accent differences in the broadcast, jumping around.

The intonation was familiar to me from northern Greece. And Arvanitika certainly sounds to me like dialectal Greek + schwas. I’ve heard Albanian on the radio in Australia once or twice, and it sounded familiar too.

But this didn’t. The <ll> and <sh> were much clearer, the vowels more mushy sounding, I even thought I heard some Russian-style palatals. The Albanian I’ve heard before sounded zingy, a bit like Greek; this didn’t. (And I have no idea if I’m just fantasising this.)

If I had to pick a language it reminded me of, I’d pick Polish.

EDIT for User-13249930999434776143. The reporter on the second video sounded much more like I expected Albanian to be. Clear schwas, crisp, and clear palatal / alveolar contrasts.

The hosts sounded crisp as well, but because they spoke very fast, they still sounded very sibilant. Not Polish at all, but perhaps Bulgarian.

God bless Khateeb, he’s actually asking me what I found in my PhD. Without me bribing him. And I’ve forgotten to reupload my thesis; Khateeb, remind me to do it if I haven’t done it in the next week.

There will be some jargon here, but I’ll try to keep it high level.

που (< ὅπου “where”) is a relative conjunction (I saw the guy that came here). It can also be used in Standard Greek to introduce some clausal complements, but not all (I am happy that you came, but not I hope that you came. I hear you walking, but not I heard that you walked. You walked in—I already knew that, but not I know that you walked in.) And especially in older vernacular Greek, it was a catch-all conjunction in general: it could be used to mean “when”, “because”, “although”, etc.

If any classicists are reading this: its range of functions is pretty similar to those of the Ancient participle.

The unifying principle seems to be that whatever clause it introduces is taken as given, in some sense. (Some very slippery, hard to express sense.) It is true and real in the world, or it is presupposed, or it is phrased as if it is presupposed.

• Τhere’s a wonderful exception in “the hell I did!”-type statements, where the speaker is making fun of the claim being presupposed by someone else: βρε άει στο διάολο που πήγα. Nicholas, N. 2005. pu-based Greek Rude Negators. Journal of Greek Linguistics 6. 103-150; http://www.opoudjis.net/Work/xez…

What’s the diversity in dialect? High level:

• Lots and lots of dialects have generalised the complement use to all real complements: they can use it to say “I heard that you walked” or “I know that you walked”. Constantinople dialect is the best known one; see http://www.opoudjis.net/Work/com…. There’s no obvious connection between the dialects, and I think it’s just independent drift: it’s the kind of construction that would generalise anyway.
• For the conjunction use, the dialects generally align, but the mainland dialects align much more closely than the island dialects do. Some island dialects do strange things with που as a conjunction, especially moving it away from given clauses, to more hypothetical clauses (e.g. “whenever”).

My irresponsible hypothesis on the latter: mainland dialects are more homogeneous grammatically, because of unimpeded communication between regions and bilingualism: analogy was more pervasive in levelling out eccentric developments, and promoting internal consistency (που always referring to given situations, etc). The islands are more eccentric linguistically in general (including more archaic): they are more isolated, and have not had any bilingualism. So they had less pressure to level out eccentricities.

What Gwydion Madawc Williams said: Vote #1 Gwydion Madawc Williams’ answer to Is anyone eligible to distribute ancient and classical texts commercially?

With one edge case as an exception.

An editor does work in reconstructing the original form of an ancient text preserved in manuscripts. That work is intellectual labour, and it can end up being substantial intellectual labour. But it has not usually been deemed a sufficient contribution for the editor to claim copyright over the ancient text they’ve reconstructed.

(They could claim copyright over the Critical apparatus of the text; and it’s no coincidence that the TLG has never entered the app crit in their digitised texts.)

But if a text is extremely fragmentary, and the editor has expended considerable ingenuity in filling in the blanks—and that does happen in some work attested in scraps of papyrus—then most of the words in the text might be not on the papyrus at all, and might be the editor’s IP instead. In that case the editor may well have more of a claim of intellectual ownership.

IANAL.

Please don’t make me reread Ambrose; it’s a big book.

But yes.

• Repeated snubs by Ike, about Nixon making VP at all, about being renominated as VP, about actually supporting Nixon’s presidential run. Culminating in the famous “shit or get off the pot” outburst by Nixon.
• Repeated jabs that Nixon had no executive experience, so he needed to be demoted to a cabinet position.
• Passive-aggressive delegation of handling Nixon to his Chief of Staff.
• Lack of any intimacy with Nixon, and inviting him to hang out with him only under sufferance.

Ike was not a party man, and Nixon was to him an imposition.

Greek uses French names for Latin letters, because French was the prestige Latin alphabet language: “Vitamini Ah, Vitamini Beh, Vitamini Seh” (to use fauxnetics).

Or least, they did. You will of course hear a lot more English names of Latin letters now in Athens, I expect.

First part, you get the PhD. Margaret FalerSweany has got that covered.

Expect to have to do at least one postdoc too.

Now the fun part. How do you become an academic.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your personal experience with obtaining a linguistics degree?

Did you run into any unexpected issues? Apart from the fact that you can’t become a tenured academic without

• stepping on corpses
• selling out and doing research in fashionable areas
• coming to view both research and teaching as drudgery
• having your career contingent on grants funding
• having no free time, let alone time for research, because you spent half your life applying for grants, half doing admin, and the other half marking?

… Still here? OK:

Field Linguist:

Read Nick Nicholas’ answer to I want to be a linguist focusing on conserving languages. Should I do it?

You’ll need to get a job in a country that has a fieldwork tradition, and where grant authorities are prepared to fund you to go to Boingo Boingo (or wherever). Australia is a good country for that. So’s Germany (Max Planck). Bits of the US. But not, say, Italy or Spain.

There’s some chance of getting a gig as a language worker with an indigenous community. That’ll get quite political, you won’t be running your own agenda, the pay will be even worse, and you’ll be living in Boingo Boingo. Some people enjoy that. 🙂

Historical Linguist:

You’ll need to get a job in a country where historical linguistics is still taken seriously, or is put up with as a necessary evil adjunct to fieldwork of underdocumented languages. The former: Germany, UK, very small patches in the US. Most European countries, though in niche positions (e.g. lexicography). The latter: Australia I guess, and other fieldwork places, although you can kiss goodbye to any work on Indo-European.

There’s some chance of getting a gig as a language revival worker with an indigenous community. See above.

Academic Linguist at all.

See unexpected issues above. You will have to network; publish; chase fashionable work; work wherever there is a gig; put up with successive postdocs and penury; and be a good salesperson to grants bodies.

Many linguistics departments in most countries were created by baby boomers, in the post-Chomsky boom. (The boom in Australia was a bit later, and more fieldwork-driven.) Waiting for people to retire (or, failing that, die) is going to have to be part of your calculation.

… Z-Kat, you didn’t expect a positive answer from me, did you? 😉

Ambivalent. See:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do many modern Greeks feel a sense of failure or perhaps inferiority when compared with their ancient Greek ancestors?

The feeling has been there for a very long time. Theodore Metochites in the 14th century lamented that the Ancients had said everything that needed to be said, so there was nothing left for his contemporaries to do. The Greek peasantry would make up stories about the pagan giants who built the inexplicable structures all around them.

The more superficial have translated the feeling of inferiority into the bombastic (“When we were building Parthenons, you guys were eating acorns”—noone that feels secure in themselves bothers to say that to Westerners). The more sensitive have had the feeling of failure gnaw at them.

Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer to Do many modern Greeks feel a sense of failure or perhaps inferiority when compared with their ancient Greek ancestors?

It is a mixed blessing: a treasure and a burden. It all depends on the view of the person carrying the legacy. Being Greek can be seen as an enormous honor and an opportunity. People struggle to grasp things that are obvious at first sight. You set yourself the goal to reach high and embark on the journey like Odysseus. […]

There are Greeks who despair of the road and turn to Lotus-eaters. I am sorry for them. They have missed the journey.

I am not Kat Rectenwald, as the following should show:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do any popular Quorans ever delete their answers?

(tl;dr: NOOOOOOOOO!!!)

And you, OP, are neither me nor Kat. So it’s impossible to make an absolute determination on matters of personal preference.

But let us lay out the considerations.

PRO DELETION:

• Your old answers may well be crap, especially if your Quora Kung-Fu did not emerge fully mature from the skull of Zeus, like mine totes did.
• You know more stuff than you did, and you have better judgement now: you don’t want your past incorrect or ill-formed questions to represent you.
• You take pride in your work.

CON DELETION:

• Non-trivial effort in seeking, judging, and eliminating old answers. Especially if you’re garullous.
• Damaging others’ content, in case they have referenced yours for whatever reason.
• How often does an old answer of yours even show up in someone else’s feed? How often do you see someone year-old answer in your feed? To my mind, not often enough. So you’d be expending effort for a problem that will very rarely surface.
• That is of course at the mercy of the Quora UI goldfish (see e.g. Hey! They changed the Quora UI font again! by Nick Nicholas on The Memes of Production) Recently old answers started surfacing more than usual, and Rage Against Quora complained about it. It was still only an occasional old answer.
• How often do you scroll down someone’s collected answers, all the way down to their answers from last year? Especially in the unpaginated Quora UI, which makes jumping back in time acutely painful. Once again: it will normally take work for an old answer to be surfaced.
• If the Quora algorithms can tell an old answer is crap, they won’t surface it anyway.
• You looooove every single word you have ever uttered. (Well, I do.) So you would never countenance deleting a single jot. (Well, I wouldn’t.)

The Con arguments are, admittedly, laziness, low return on investment, conceit (though so is pride in one’s work), and a small risk of linkrot. For many people, those Con arguments aren’t compelling. For me, they are, and it’s the Pro arguments that aren’t compelling.

Hah!

I answer this with the assertion that I am secure in my masculinity! Secure, I tell you!

…

Fluffy St John.

… Wasn’t there a Bond girl surnamed St John? That’s right: Jill St. John

Like looking into a fricking mirror, I tell ya: