How do you use Quora? Do you spend equal/more time reading, editing, asking questions, or answering questions?

I used to read much more. There are still days where I can spend a good couple of hours reading, and it’s my favourite activity in between tasks or in transit.

But as I get more and more A2As, and as I’ve become more and more proud of writing, I spend a lot more time answering questions than before. And I spend a lot of time on comments (discussions on my answers or answers), and some time in messaging.

My routine is to start by going through notifications, have exchanges with others on comments, then read answers in my notifications, then split between reading my feed and answering questions. About equal time comments and answering, a bit more time than either reading feed.

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.

Ancient Greek: where is a “w” sound used in Greek?

OK, Nick wading in.

Like James Garry and Robert Todd said: the digamma, ϝ, is an archaic letter of Greek, pronounced as /w/. It is present as a sound in Linear B, and it survived into Aeolic, but it did not survive into the other *written* dialects of Greek.

We know it was there in Ancient Greek for three reasons.

  • First, Indo-European reconstruction. Like James said, we know that οἶνος oinos used to be ϝοῖνος woinos, from other Indo-European languages preserving a related sound; e.g. Latin vinum.
  • Second, internal reconstruction. In particular, syllabic augment of vowels. The past tense of ἔργω ergō “I work” should be *ἦργον ērgon, with an eta [ɛːrɡon]. It is instead εἶργον eirgon, with an ei [eːrɡon]. That makes no sense, until you realise (a) that Attic ei corresponds to Homeric ἔεργον eergon [eerɡon], and (b) that happens because there used to be a /w/ there: ἔ-ϝεργον ewergon. So it’s just an epsilon prefixed to a consonant, like all other syllabic augments
    • Why yes, *wergō is cognate with English work.
  • Linear B is not an argument for working out where digammas were, because that’s circular: we were able to decipher Linear B based on the external and internal reconstruction of Greek.
  • The final criterion is hiatus in Homer, gaps between vowels in the metre that do not make sense by how Greek verse is supposed to work. They do make sense, if we posit that there used to be digammas there in the original verse.

There is a delightful Xena fanfic about the digamma: For Ant of a Nail

So digammas are not written down in Homer, but we know they were there. They were only written down in Aeolic and Linear B.


Ioannis Stratakis (podium-arts.com) is meticulous in his reconstruction; I also hear digammas in his Herodotus. ἴδεν, he pronounces as ϝίδεν; we have evidence for that both from Latin, and from internal reconstruction (the augmented aorist is εἶδεν, with a syllabic augment).

ἄστυ – Wiktionary tells me that ἄστυ used to have a digamma too:

From ϝάστυ ‎(wástu), with possible connection with Sanskrit वस्तु ‎(vastu, “house”) and Latin verna.

Can you identify all the Canadian provinces/territories?

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.

How are you so knowledgeable?

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.

How can someone be a top Quora anything for 2017 already?

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).

Is use of diminutives that lost their diminutive meaning a common phenomenon in the development of languages?

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.

Why do humans want to have sex with attractive people?

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.)