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Hm. No participles, no infinitives, no relativisers, no conditionals. Some conjunctions are the same, but you can already see we’re surrendering a lot of syntactic complexity to do this.

No future or perfect, no unaccented augments, no datives, no prepositions with genitives (and the rest look different anyway), bits of the 1st and 3rd declensions out of bounds, as are most inflections of the copula, and 3pl forms. And of course almost none of the modal particles.

And worst of all: most final nu movables are going to sound archaic in Modern Greek nowadays, and you said Modern Greek, not Katharevousa. Which kills a lot off too.

I mean, it’s doable, but the sentences are going to be clauses early on in Ancient Greek textbooks.

So, I got me an Ancient Greek Textbook: http://cdn.textkit.net/WS_A_Firs…

Not easy. I’m settling for allowing slightly marked sound. And it took me 8 exercises.

• Ὀ φιλόσοφος τὰ καλὰ θαυμάζει, “the philosopher admires beautiful (Ancient)/good (Modern) things.” (Marked syntax in Modern) §8
• Τὰ μεγάλα δῶρα τῆς τύχης οἱ σοφοὶ φοβοῦνται, “wise men fear the great gifts of Fortune (Ancient)/Chance (Modern)” (Marked syntax in Modern) §23

Or:

Ὀ ναύτης ἀκούει ὅτι ὁ μαθητὴς ἔμαθε τὸ μάθημα, “the sailor hears that the student learned the lesson”

Habib le toubib, how do you manage to keep breaking my heart so with your questions? (Ah, by sending A2A’s that I leave in the too hard basket for weeks.)

I admire and love the ideal of liberal arts education. I do. Really. It makes you a better person.

But we live in an age where universities are not the province of the children of the loaded, which is where the ideal of liberal arts education flourished. Unis are not there to train philosopher kings (or at least philosopher baronets).

Universities seek to be loss-leaders for research; they’ll take in whoever’ll pay, and they’ll give them a crap education while they’re doing it. The State needs credentialed citizens, because it needs a trained workforce.

(And oh, the disaster that AI is about to wreak on the white collar workforce. But hey, at least they’ll then have the free time for a liberal arts education. If they don’t starve first.)

It is also true that the web allows the democratisation of vocational learning (and we’re seeing that), and also the democratisation of Bildung, of the kind of education that’s good for you. MOOCs are a thing, and so are fora like this.

Universities were about learning. Societies has made universities about credentialisation. But for better or worse, that too is getting disrupted now, along with everything else.

Guess I have to lead by example.

71.8%

Yeah, coulda done better. Still, glad to see I got a bit more achieved in the 25 years since I last did this Purity Test!

Nope, and I’m intrigued to know how other non-Americans will do at the task.

Per Nick Nicholas’ answer to What do you think when you hear the words, “United States”?

Without cheating: forgot 5 states, and misplaced another 7.

And I think I’m on the upper range for non-Americans.

Some good answers here, but none giving the obvious reference: Jared Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel. It was despite (mediaeval) Christianity: Byzantium stopped all science very early. The Islamic world was into Science before Christendom was, and the switches in both worlds were not about the religion, but about interpretations of the religion.

As for why Christianity went big time when it hit Europe: that’s all about the Roman Empire and its successor states, and the power vacuum to its North. And about the Persian Empire rejecting Christianity as a Roman thing.

I’d enjoy it. In fact, I clearly do it: there is a difference in how I engage with a bestie that I banter with constantly (like, say, Zeibura S. Kathau) and a friend of a friend, one of whose answers I was impressed by.

But… I can make that distinction in my head, because I recognise my besties. I’m not clear what additional functionality or UI distinctions Quora needs to add. I think I’m more friendly to social networking use of Quora than Konstantinos Konstantinides is; but like him, I don’t see what value it would add for Quora to make such a distinction in its interface.

If you have something in mind, OP, I’d be interested to hear it; but be aware that Quora, as far as I can tell, has never been enthusiastic about the social networking use of Quora.

Vote #1 Trevor Sullivan: Trevor Sullivan’s answer to What is functional grammar?

It’s the correct answer, but not defensive enough for my liking. 🙂 So treat this answer as a restatement of his.

There are several ways of explaining why language is the way it is. Originally, the split was between diachronic and synchronic explanations. The diachronic account, which is historical linguistics, explains language in terms of earlier stages of the same language, and change processes. The synchronic account, which took over as the mainstream with Saussure, explains language as a system in its own right, rather than seeking to explain it in terms of process.

Since maybe the 70s in some quarters, but the 50s in others, there is a related split.

• The formalist account of language explains language as a system in itself, without appealing to extralinguistic causes. An explanation in formalism is the formulation of rules that explain the distribution of phonemes and words and phrases. Generative grammar is the major class of formalist accounts. It ultimately appeals to a language device in the brain: language is the way it is, because that’s how the rules for linguistic structure in the brain work.
• The functionalist account of language explains language as a means of communicating meaning. So giving the rules by itself is not enough in functionalism: functionalism want to know why those rules, and not others, are best suited to communication. The rules end up having a lot to do with pragmatics and semantics and discourse structure, as Trevor says; and ultimately functionalism concludes that language is the way it is because of cognitive patterns in general, and not a part of the brain specific to language. If you think about it, that also means functionalism is a lot friendlier to diachrony.

They’re incommensurate approaches; *shrug*. To a functionalist, formalist accounts don’t really explain anything, and are circular. To a formalist, functionalist accounts are specious Just-So speculation, and are unscientific.

(I’ll only disagree with Trevor in one detail: functionalists in my experience love typology—it gives them more things to explain in their terms.)

The home turf of functionalism is the West Coast of the US, and it was also big in Australia when I was going through the system. Systemic functional linguistics is an earlier branch of the theory, developed in the UK and Australia (though restricted to Sydney Uni there), and which other functionalists don’t like. It is very popular in applied linguistics, as it gives paedagogically satisfying accounts of language variety.

Ah, Purity Tests. Such fond memories of my misspent youth. I actually knew people who knew people who refrigerated their own poop to reduce their score.

And that was clearly wasn’t this version of the Purity Test.

I’m pretty vanilla, to my slight disappointment. 46.

Because Quora writers know what they’re doing.

Of course, rank beginners don’t know what they’re doing. Partly because Quora has never onboarded well, but it is a reasonable and laudable requirement of the community, that a question with explanation and illustration is more useful (and frankly much more fun to write), than a one-liner I could have found on Google. As indeed McKayla Kennedy said in her answer.

But Quora can’t read writers’ minds. If only there were some sort of probation mechanism, whereby Quora would stop collapsing short answers, once writers had established their bona fides as experienced writers…

… which of course, is exactly what happens. See How long has it been since a bot has collapsed one of your answers for shortness (Sept 2016)?

There’s a lot about Quora UX I think is stupid, but this isn’t one of them.

I’ll second Spyros Theodoritsis. Yes, Greek Cypriots killed Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus in intercommunity violence. Yes, there was de facto partition of the island since 1963. Yes, if you talk to at least some Greek Cypriots for long enough (as I did with my uncle there), you’ll work out that despite their professed desire for a reunified Cyprus (as long as the mainland Turks go away), they don’t necessarily have a lot of respect for Turkish Cypriots.

But no, making Cyprus Türkenrein has never been a talking point for Greek Cypriots. They do want their homes back, as you’ve clarified the question, OP, but they do actually want reunification and peace as well. I don’t think they’d trust any population exchange solution to resolve anything anyway: it’s a cause of Turkish resentment just waiting to happen.

Although it has to be said, the newer generation of Greek Cypriots has gotten quite used to living with partition; and reunification is no longer for Greek Cypriots an existential question, the way it has been for Turkish Cypriots.