Do Australians cringe when non-native English speakers attempt to learn the Australian accent?

What Christine Leigh Langtree said: Vote #1 Christine Leigh Langtree’s answer to Do Australians cringe when non-native English speakers attempt to learn the Australian accent?

I’ll add that most dialect speakers dislike their accent being mimicked, not just Australians; I know I resented the hell out of 1960s Greek comedies’ bad imitation of Cretan. If you don’t get it right, it does come across as mockery.

BUT for non-native speakers… we make a lot of allowances, because we know it’s not mockery. The accent will gradually come naturally anyway. And the less self-conscious you are about it, the more readily it will happen. We have met IRL, Miguel, and your accent is still mostly US/Philippines—but not completely!

How many states can you identify on the Map of India?

I was the OP of the first of these questions, to make a point: we should not criticise Americans for not knowing the geography of places they are not that involved in.

I am now so, so screwed:

Was I even remotely close?

  • Nagaland: misplaced by two states
  • Assam: Yes!
  • Uttar Pradesh: misplaced by two states.
  • Rajasthan: Yes!
  • Tami Nadu: Yes!
  • Kerala: misplaced by three states.
  • (West) Bengal: misplaced by one state.
  • Come on, why didn’t I get Kashmir? I think I wasn’t sure whether it was a state or not.
  • I didn’t even know Lakshadweep (the islands to the southwest) was a territory. (Not a state though.)

Not… great. Sorry, India.

How often do you comment on Quora? Why do you comment?

First thing I do every morning is spend at least a half hour replying to comments in my notifications. I’ll comment on answers I read during the day, when something strikes my fancy; maybe a dozen a day? Maybe 20? I should count some time.

I use Quora sociably. Not to the exclusion of my intellectualising, and often as a supplement for my intellectualising—I often have quite good intellectual to-and-fro. I also have lots of good banter. Commenting is a core part of my Quora experience. And not just mine.

How hard would it be to write more poetry using only Quora questions?

Mergers and edits can, it’s true, impair
the incidental rhymes of Quora questions.
The metre of such verse would brook deflections
as well—though your example doesn’t care.

But I’d dispute the questions need be live.
They can be captured at the time of writing,
and any links can redirect. Inviting
their permanence is hope that cannot thrive.

You posit here a jeu d’esprit, a joke,
no verse with which the heavens to command.
Let it then be a mandala in sand:
the transitoriness its masterstroke.

How is the enmity between Greece and Albania different to that between Greece and Turkey?

I’m going to speak from a Greek perspective, and I hope that Turks and Albanians will weigh in.

The hostility between Greece and Turkey is very old, and definitional to their identity. They came to regard each other as the Primordial Enemy. (Hence the immortal line on Ekşi Sözlük: “The good old days, when Greece was the National Enemy.”)

Greeks really did come to define themselves as Not-Turks. The world was viewed through a binary lens of enmity, and had been since the Seljuks came to Anatolia; the credal difference between Islam and Christianity was all enmeshed with the ethnic difference (and in reality took priority over it). And there are defining incidents in Greek history which can serve as rallying points for that enmity. 1071, 1453, 1669, 1821, 1897, 1923, 1974.

Enmity between Greeks and Albanians just does not have that kind of heritage. Until the forced islamisations, Albanians were another annoying Balkan ethnicity. In situ in Albania, there were yet another people with an uncouth language for the Byzantine elite to look down on. As the Arvanites, they were warlords and settlers in Greece; they were stereotyped as pigheaded, and either admired or feared as warriors, but they were close-by neighbours.

Once the islamisations happened, Muslim Albanians were Turks. The Millet-based split was total; to Greeks, Muslim Albanians were Muslims first, Albanians second. Hence the confused appelation Turkalvani, which does not mean Turkish Albanians at all, but Muslim Albanians. In the Greek War of Independence, Orthodox Arvanites fought Muslim Shqipetars; they spoke the same language (maybe in a different dialect, maybe not); but as far as Greeks were concerned, the Arvanites were Greeks, and the Shqipetars were Turks.

That’s why any enmity of Albanians and Greeks is pretty recent. A notion of Albanian nationhood was stymied through to the end of the 19th century, because not only the Greeks, but the Albanians themselves regarded themselves as Christian or Muslim first, and Albanians second. That’s why it was so important for Albanian nationalists to proclaim that the religion of Albania is Albanianism: without Albanianism, there could be no Albania.

And hate to say it, but because of all that, Greeks have hardly noticed Albania as an enemy. Anything up until 1912 was chalked up to the Turks—including Ali Pasha of Ioannina. (How many Greeks realise he was Albanian? How many care?) The raids of the Christian Arvanites against their neighbours, which gave Greek its word for “plunder” (πλιάτσικο < plaçkë “thing”—plaçkë e luftës “thing of war” is implied) have been long forgotten.

There was an ongoing enmity against Turks until recently (and of course, the atavistic stuff still lurks in the collective subconscious, despite the Thaw). In the face of a bogeyman that imposing, any hostility against Albanians from Greeks was secondary, and localised. (And I know very well that Albanians have not felt the same way.)

Albanians became prominent in the popular conscious again with the mass migrations of the 1990s. There was a lot of hostility, and I’ve heard reports that the Arvanites were particularly hard on the Albanian migrants: they had something to prove. But it was really not the fear and existential stuff that was invoked with Turks; it was looking down on them.

Since then, the reaction has gone two ways (from what I gather from a distance). On the liberal side, the Albanians are the model minority, admired for their work ethic, and even seen as a welcome addition to the polity. (That’s a pretty extreme view for Greece, of course.) On the reactionary side, well, one of the favourite chants of the thugs is Δεν θα γίνεις Έλληνας ποτέ, Αλβανέ, Αλβανέ-έ-έ “You’ll never be a Greek, Albanian, Albanian!”

But from memory, hostility towards Albania has never roused the level of ire or passion that hostility towards Turkey has.

How many Brazilian states can you identify on a map?

There are 22 states in Brazil. I know this, because of the Brazilian flag. Ordem e Progresso!

Of those states, I can name…

Um…

Is Rio a state as well as a city?

Please don’t unfollow me, Alfredo. Your point is very well taken.

If you ran Quora, what would you do to make it better?

Ah, Mez.

There’s symptoms of what needs to be fixed in Quora, and then there’s the underlying issue.

Almost all answers are targeting the symptoms. Which is cool, the symptoms are what they’re experience and being frustrated by.

But look deeper. If I’m running Quora, I have to deal with the underlying issues. Not just the symptoms.

Scott Welch got closer than everyone to the issues—the lack of a continuous improvement culture, and the debacle of corporate culture reported on at Glassdoor.

But dig deeper yet, if you step into the shoes of Adam DiCaprio. Scott and I have done so face to face, and I know he’s said it here too.

But he’s had his shot at an answer, Mez. And here’s mine.

Why do I loathe Quora Inc. by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency

I decided that if I’m going to be a Welchite about Quora, and complain about it, I owe Quora the courtesy of articulating why constructively.

And I split the post into “At the surface”, and “At the core”.

At the surface is the stuff everyone complains about. Moderation, UI, User Relations.

At the core… well, I’ll quote my blog post.

Lack of leadership

Who’s running the show? Is there a CTO? Is there a CFO? Why are all the high profile managers jumping ship? Does D’Angelo even exist, or is he a scripted bot? If he’s a scripted bot, can we at least improve the frequency of his posts?

Lack of vision

What problem is Quora solving? Is it an expert forum? Is it a social forum? Is it a knowledge repository, crowdsourcing Doug Lenat’s Cyc? Is it a training bed for AI bots? For intranet knowledge bases? Where do we writers fit in? Why are we here and not on StackExchange?

Lack of sustainability

It’s been six years of burning through venture capital; even by Silly-Con Valley standards, that’s been a while. Is there a plan for profitability? Is there a not-for-profit exit strategy? Is there a strategy at all? And will there be a Quora in five years’ time?

These issues are not getting visibly fixed. And these, in the end, will unhouse us all.

You want to make Quora better? Don’t just fix the symptoms. Fix the core. A Quora in five years that’s exactly the same, with the same random number generator UI and unaccountable moderation and adversarial user relations—is still better than a defunct Quora.

Is Wendish The oldest European language?

As a wise man (or failing that, me) said (Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which language is older, Persian or Arabic?):

There’s no such thing as an older language.

Markus Zeeb brought up all the right caveats about Basque in his answer:

so Basque might be the oldest (or rather longest continuously spoken) language in Europe (whatever that means, to be honest).

And Aquitanian, the actual ancestor of Basque, prominently figures in my answer above.

So no, Wendish (Sorbian languages) may have been spoken in Eastern Germany before German was. But Wendish is not meaningfully older than German, and is no older than Slovakian, or Greek, or Spanish, or Aquitanian. Even if Wendish were extraordinarily conservative as an Indo-European language, which is not a claim I’ve heard.

What are some common and popular Greek beverages?

  • Coffee:
    • Turkish coffee (renamed Greek coffee) for the older generation
    • Frappé coffee for the younger generation
    • Instant coffee (“Nes”) as a lighter, more western option
    • Variants such as Vienna Coffee for a night out
    • Nursed for hours at a café
    • First beverage at home in the morning
  • Herbal teas
    • Sage, Camomile, Nettle
    • Drunk when you’re ill, as a restorative
    • Stereotypically associated with old people; hence Zambetas’ great lyric, Οι νέοι θέλουν έρωτα, κι οι γέροι χαμομήλι, “The young need love; the old need camomile”
  • Tea
    • That thing that English people drink
    • Traditionally treated as a counterpart of herbal teas: a health drink, rather than a social drink
  • Wine
    • The traditional drink of feasting and celebration; can be seen at the dining table
    • Not watered since Byzantium
    • But already resinated since Byzantium (see below)
    • Traditionally, there’s some homebrew lurking around in the village; buying a decent commercial vintage is a nouveau things
    • There are fine venerable distinctive grapes in Greece—Category:Grape varieties of Greece – Wikipedia is a long list. But traditionally, people drink whatever’s handy locally. In my experience, it’s on the sour and unsubtle side.
  • Retsina
    • Resinated as a preservative
    • A tart taste that makes no sense outside Greece, but a lot of sense with lamb chops with oregano
    • Default drink of the taverna
    • Endearingly served in tin pitchers
  • Beer
    • Introduced with the Bavarians in the 1830s. The venerable and recently revived brand Fix was originally Fuchs.
    • In my youth, there were just two brands: Amstel and Heineken (locally called “Green”), with an occasional showing of Löwenbräu. There’s a lot more now, including local brews (and the beginnings of microbrews).
    • Traditionally the secondary, lighter alternative to wine; more common (I think) when going out than in feasts at home.
  • Raki/Tsikoudia/Tsipouro
    • Traditional hard drink
    • Drunk straight in shot glasses
    • If you’ve had grappa, you’ve had raki. It’s a Pomace brandy.
    • Drunk with mezze (tapas)
    • Much more a drink of manly men celebrating each other’s manliness than a feast drink
  • Ouzo
    • Variant of raki
    • Drunk straight in shot glasses, or watered down in tumblers
    • Actually corresponds to Turkish rakı, with the whole aniseed flavour and the turning white with water
    • Drunk in ouzeries (tapas joints), and I assume by manly men celebrating each other’s manliness
  • Whisky
    • The urban and urbane counterpart to raki
    • The choice of the Greek going to a Western-style bar
    • The choice of the Greek showing off their affluence
  • Coke
    • Default soft drink, like it is eveywhere
  • Sprite
    • Second default soft drink, like it is eveywhere
  • Gazoza
    • Traditional equivalent to Sprite, though a bit more lemony
    • Fell out of favour in the last few decades
  • Visinada
    • Sour cherry juice (or cordial, and sometimes carbonated)
  • Byral
    • A local imitation of Coke
    • Big in the 60s, before Coke was launched locally

What is the timeline of the Greek breathings?

I’ve written a fair bit up about this at http://www.opoudjis.net/unicode/… . All secondary research, but it’s secondary research that seems to have been cited at Wikipedia.

Your timeline is right:

  • There was a distinct heta letter for /h/, which looked like H, but it was not used in all locations.
  • There was an innovation in antiquity (ca 400 BC), whereby Greeks in Southern Italy broke H in half, and used that for /h/: Ͱ
  • From there, Greek papyri use one half of H as a diacritic to indicate an H is present, and the other half to indicate they are missing: x҅ x҆ . (I didn’t write down when, but my page says “by the time Greek starts showing up in papyri”, so it would have been around 300 BC—before /h/ stopped being pronounced.
  • Those symbols survived long enough to be passed on to Early Cyrillic, and thus Unicode.
  • In Greek manuscripts by the 12th century, the diacritics ended up being curved: ἀ ἀ
  • Notice that the symbols were used long after the /h/ stopped being pronounced. In fact, accents and breathings started being notated as diacritics, precisely because they were starting to be lost in pronunciation. They were first used to teach proper speech, and after they had completely disappeared, they kept being used because the ancients had used them.