Category: Uncategorized

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.

• 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

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.

I want to preface my response by saying thank you to Sam Morningstar, by continuing with the strategy I set off in How many African countries can you identify on a map?

I also want to say that I have the deepest of respect and affection for my fellow members of the Commonwealth, from the great country of Canada.

I want to say that, because that’s not what my knowledge of Canadian geography says.

So, how have I sinned?

• Swapped Alberta and Saskatchewan. Saskatatatchewan. Skachatewan. That guy.
• Thought Nunavut was the new name for the Northwest Territories. It’s the new name for half the Northwest Territories.
• Thought I didn’t need to name the Northwest Territories properly anymore, because they’d been replaced by Nunavut.
• Labrador’s part of the official name of Newfieland? Why, Canada? But yes, Mike Bowerbank, I know Labrador is the mainland bit.
• Wow. I actually got the location of PIE right. Who knew. Didn’t even need a magnifying glass, Mike. In fact, I thought I got it wrong, because no way was PIE that big.

Hoo boy. I’m being A2A’d this by Michaelis Maus, and he’s a trenchant one: I can’t give him a glib answer, and I can’t just protest that I’m an impostor.

OK.

• I read a lot as a kid, as others did, and picked up a lot of encyclopaedic knowledge that way. It helps to connect the dots when you know what the dots are. It was harder when I was a kid, because no Interwebs; I ended up reading through most of the World Book Encyclopedia, and I also read pretty generally through my high school, local, and university library.
• I read the newspaper religiously back in the day, which gave me good news and international awareness.
• I studied a specific subject at university level:
• I determined to gain a grounding of linguistics, a subject I actually loved, after University Engineering let me down.
• I determined to become a world authority in the subject matter my PhD was within.
• I lectured undergrads for a couple of semesters, which helps you systematise that knowledge.
• I became online-search aware, when online search replaced reading.
• I spent a couple of years reading Wikipedia the way I used to read through my local library.

And here’s the impostor bit. I answer a lot of questions that, by Quora’s standards (and by many users’ standards) I have no business answering. I have a superficial knowledge of the subject matter, that needs to be bolstered by Wikipedia; and the body of my answer is intelligent guesswork, based on extrapolation from situations or disciplines I am more familiar with, or from a willingness to think through foundational assumptions.

Most A2As I respond to from Mehrdad Dəmirçi fall into that category (and there a lot I don’t respond to, because even I have my limits). I know very little about Iran. Until this past year on Quora, I had not even clicked how many Azeris there are in Iran. So I have no business answering Why does Iran have a variety of ethnic groups? As a Greek, I know less than Wikipedia does about the Ottoman Empire; I was actually guessing at the meanings of the terms when I answered Why do you think Ottomanism and Pan-Islamism Failed?

I think the answers I wrote come across as knowledgable (you tell me), but they really are intelligent guesses.

For which I make no apology. Intelligence is the ability to make connections, not just the hoarding of facts. The specialist has the best sense of where the connections lie, but the generalist (or at least, the specialist in a slightly related field) is still equipped to draw conclusions.

And if I get stuff wrong, I expect people here to pipe up and tell me so.

There was a switch in 2015 (someone correct me if I’m wrong) from Top Quorans being named for the year past, to Top Quorans being named for the year ahead (though of course still judged on their past year’s output).

I believe it is (add Russian, bigtime), but I’ve just gone through half a dozen historical linguistics textbooks, and it’s not discussed separately in any of them. I was even struggling to find a good term describing this phenomenon: lexicalised diminutives I guess is the best.

The problem is that semantic change is massively variegated, and the typologies of semantic change (which covers this) are pretty vague. This could be argued to be an instance of litotes/understatement, or an instance of generalisation, or an instance of bleaching.

The learned researcher Susan James (Vote #1: Susan James’ answer to Why do humans want to have sex with attractive people?) is of course right in the evolutionary selection angle, and even more right in the cultural situatedness of attractiveness. The body-ideal of Botswana sure isn’t the ideal of the 2016 US, which wasn’t the ideal of 1956 US.

But there’s a bit of semantics being missed here. It’s not that the notion of attractiveness is preexisting, and people want to have sex with people bearing that characteristic. There is physical fitness or suitability for child-bearing, which has visual correlates; in fact Susan has pointed them out in previous answers (I think;, though Quora Search, so I can’t find them). So breasts or butts (or six packs) tend to correlate with attractiveness.

But attractiveness is also culturally determined; there are plenty of cultures in which big butts or physical fitness are not prized as attractive. In fact attractiveness is defined the other way around. Attractive people are defined as those people that humans (in that particular culture) want to have sex with.

(And that also helps you with LGBTI+, which a narrowly evolutionary approach doesn’t.)

Can we say MS Word is artificially intelligent?

Can we say tyrannosaurus are relative of kangaroos? Why?