Category: Uncategorized

This may not be the kind of linguistics you’re into. It is the kinda of linguistics I’m into. And it’s magisterial: it’s worth getting even if you’re not actually interested in Mandarin:

Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. University of California Press, 1989

Because, for better or worse, Sports in Australia has contributed to Australians’ sense of who they are. And it has done so since easily the 1870s.

For the answer to why that has happened: See How has sport shaped Australia’s national identity?

Contra Loretta B DeLoggio, I am not more mature and patient than a high school student. 🙂

Quora’s server being down goes into the same box for me as Quora’s UI stuffing up, or Quora losing my comment because of its bizarre insistence on connectivity and refreshing, or Quora losing days’ worth of stats, any number of glitches that somehow do not seem to plague other comparable sites I use.

I growl “Fricking Quora”, I hit refresh a couple of times, and then I find something else to do for the next hour. Which in fact is what Loretta does too!

René Alix has basically covered it in his answer (Vote #1 René Alix’s answer to Why can’t we perceive onomatopoeia in other languages as easily as in our native language?)

But there’s something that’s only implicit in René’s answer, that I’ll make explicit:

No actual dogs really sound like that. And so you get the transcription of a facsimile of a sound representing entire microcosms of sounds, and end up with varying, though often vaguely similar words. Oh, and then somebody goes and transliterates them from another language with a different writing system, so we find out that Mandarin Chinese use ”wong wong” for their dog bark, and Arabic speakers use “nabah”.

To make it explicit: onomatopoeias in language are still somewhat arbitrary mappings of sound to meaning. There is a somewhat arbitrary choice of a particular rendering of a bark or a splash into sound, and that choice becomes conventionalised as a word of a particular language.

Because the choice is somewhat arbitrary and conventionalised, it will make sense to you once someone has pointed it out to you, and you are already familiar with it. But without forewarning, you may be surprised. As English speakers are indeed surprised at wong wong or nabah—and as Arabic or Chinese speakers are surprised at woof woof or arf arf or bow wow.

You aren’t surprised at Chinese onomatopoeia because you learned those words, just as you learned any word in Chinese. You can recognise the limited degree of non-arbitrariness of the words, their Iconicity. You are surprised at English onomatopoeia, because you expect onomatopoeia not to be conventionalised, but purely transparent in its iconicity. And that’s what I’m saying: onomatopoeia is not as iconic as you expect, and our native language knowledge of onomatopoeia blinds us to that.

I read Geoffrey Blainey: A Shorter History of Australia by Nick Nicholas on Aphypnēsis Amichaiou , which actually posed this question. And if I hadn’t left the book in the hotel… well, I still wouldn’t look it up.

But in brief:

• Australians defined themselves early on (like, 1820s) against the British, for being more fit and active, in their new country.
• Australians had a lot more leisure time than Dickensian Britons did; remember that the eight-hour day was pioneered in Australia in the 1850s. So sporting fixtures became a prominent part of the community already at that time: not just racecourses, satisfying their need for gambling, but also sports ovals, satisfying their need to watch sport and participate in sport.
• That participation thing is key: sport establishes itself more readily as part of your identity if you and most people you know actually play one.
• Sport gave a very early opportunity for Australians to assert a distinct identity against Britain, and even to beat Britain at its own game (particularly at cricket).
• Once those elements were in place, they just kept going. After cricket as an international spectator sport, athletics and tennis. Cricket and the football codes, as both participatory and spectator sports. The football codes as a new tribalism (something familiar elsewhere of course). The Ashes, rugby, tennis, the Olympics, the Empire and then Commonwealth games, as ways Australia gained international prominence.

(Oh, God, not Afrocentric history, anything but that.)

Afrocentric pages online say Diodorus Siculus said:

“The Aethiopians (Ethiopians) are high favored with the gods, they were the first of all men created by the gods and were the founders of the Egyptian Civilization.”

Diodorus Siculus actually says this:

LacusCurtius • Diodorus Siculus

Now the Ethiopians, as historians relate, were the first of all men and the proofs of this statement, they say, are manifest. […] furthermore, that those who dwell beneath the noon-day sun were, in all likelihood, the first to be generated by the earth, is clear to all; since, inasmuch as it was the warmth of the sun which, at the generation of the universe, dried up the earth when it was still wet and impregnated it with life, it is reasonable to suppose that the region which was nearest the sun was the first to bring forth living creatures.

OK. That’s not saying Greeks thought black people were better than them. That’s just a Just-So story that the equator originated all life because Heat, somehow. And it has nothing to do with the Olduwai Gorge!

And they say that they were the first to be taught to honour the gods and to hold sacrifices and processions and festivals and the other rites by which men honour the deity; and that in consequence their piety has been published abroad among all men, and it is generally held that the sacrifices practised among the Ethiopians are those which are the most pleasing to heaven. As witness to this they call upon the poet who is perhaps the oldest and certainly the most venerated among the Greeks; for in the Iliad he represents both Zeus and the rest of the gods with him as absent on a visit to Ethiopia to share in the sacrifices and the banquet which were given annually by the Ethiopians for all the gods together:

For Zeus had yesterday to Ocean’s bounds
Set forth to feast with Ethiop’s faultless men,
And he was followed there by all the gods.

That just means that Homer found the Ethiopians exotic. And again, in all likelihood the reason for that was simply the Ancient Greeks, in Homer’s time, thinking Gods = Sun = Equator = Black people.

And they state that, by reason of their piety towards the deity, they manifestly enjoy the favour of the gods, inasmuch as they have never experienced the rule of an invader from abroad; for from all time they have enjoyed a state of freedom and of peace one with another, and although many and powerful rulers have made war upon them, not one of these has succeeded in his undertaking.

We actually know very little of the History of Ethiopia before the Kingdom of Aksum. Diodorus knew very little too. And that’s hardly a strong argument for anything.

They say also that the Egyptians are colonists sent out by the Ethiopians, Osiris having been the leader of the colony. For, speaking generally, what is now Egypt, they maintain, was not land but sea when in the beginning the universe was being formed; afterwards, however, as the Nile during the times of its inundation carried down the mud from Ethiopia, land was gradually built up from the deposit.

Yeah. More Just-So stories, I fear. You can read more at the link.

As far as I can tell, everything is just exoticisation of a people who lived near the equator, and that Greeks had very little contact with. (And Diodorus wrote in the Roman era anyway.)

Wow. 2015 MacBook Pro.

Safari open with 11 windows, 73 tabs.

9 Windows in Finder. I tend to leave search windows open.

12 Terminal windows. I only need 4 at a given programming task.

16 tabs in my BBEdit text editor. I only need one or two.

iCal.

System settings.

Wunderlist.

Mac Mail, with 5 emails open.

I’m on vacation. There’s normally also two or three Microsoft Office documents, at least one Excel Spreadsheet, often one or two Powerpoints, iTunes, Slack, Skype, and maybe the Eclipse programming environment.

I know you want to know about the tabs open while on Quora in particular. I’ll have multiple tabs open with notifications (because I keep forgetting, and because notifications is how I navigate what to do), answer requests (which this was one of), a couple of Wikipedia pages to help with answers, half a dozen answers I should get around to reading or commenting on. When I don’t have as big an A2A backlog, and at least one instance of a Quora feed.

If I end up opening a new window for Quora because of tab overload, the “I’ll get around to them” tabs end up forgotten in the old window.

Mariam Als, thank you for your A2As. I truly am not qualified to answer this, and I hope Dimitris Almyrantis will. Irene Avetyan, I’m looking at you too. This is more to provoke an answer out of them, and it’s not rooted in any great understanding of Ottoman or Turkish history.

(That, and I’m cleaning out my A2A queue today.)

There are various forces historically that give cohesion to States. We have seen a change in the relative strength of those forces in the last couple of centuries; and that has undermined both Ottomanism and Pan-Islamism, in favour of Nationalism.

I’m not familiar with the term Ottomanism, but I’ll assume it’s the whole notion of a multi-ethnic empire, with a dominant ethnicity and/or religion and/or culture. Europe was doing the same thing with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the Ottoman Empire collapsed for the same reason as the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Nationalism was a more compelling cause for the non-dominant peoples within the empire.

I recently had an exchange with Erdi Küçük about footage of Greek POWs discussing their encounter with Atatürk.

https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Peg…

Greek with Turkish subtitles, no English unfortunately. The gist is, Atatürk had won, and had done away with the Ottoman Empire in the process; but he was still complaining to the Greek POWs of how disloyal they had been to the Empire, and how the Empire had indulged their theatrical performances of Greek nationalist plays with no recrimination. (“The stage was white with kilts and swords!”)

Erdi said something that blew me away with how perceptive it was:

You sort of realize that at that point, he’s still a bitter Ottoman officer who couldn’t get over the fact that empire is gone (and his viewpoint is exactly the reason why it’s gone), and he’s unhappy even at victory.

Atatürk’s viewpoint was still Ottomanist. It could not cope with the Greeks’ Nationalism.

Nationalism, admittedly, has been a poor fit for the Arabic-Speaking world. But it’s worked a treat for Turkey, which has embraced it whole-heartedly (even if it is launching its own Pan-Turkic system of alliances now). And, in a way I haven’t quite worked out, nationalism (or at least, a Shi’a-centric focus) has worked fine for Iran too.

If Ottomanism was frustrated by European Nationalism, Pan-Islamism failed even earlier: the Ummah had already stopped paying attention to a single caliph when the Fatimids and the Ummayads set up their own caliphates in the tenth century: Caliphate. Pan-Islamism was frustrated by the emergence of rival centres of power within the Arabic speaking Sunni world, long before the Turks were part of the picture: Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, Fez, Cordoba; and there was no possibility that India, let alone Indonesia, would ever be yoked into the same political entity as the Arabs.

Any notion of Pan-Islamism is anachronistic; the Rashidun (the first caliphate of Islam) is not coming back, and the Rashidun was never going to stay united with it covering the amount of ground it did so quickly. The Ottoman Sultan was the nominal caliph; but I just can’t buy it that the Sultan’s caliphate meant all that much in terms of keeping the empire together. It didn’t make Morocco or Iran rush to join up.

Homo significans, “human who makes meaning”, is already a well established expression. So is homo interpres, “interpreting human”, human who makes sense of things.

You’re doing something more subtle: “seeking meaning in the universe, anticipating that there will be meaning”. It’s very close to homo interpres. But if you want to be more explicit: homo signa quaerens, or homo significationem quaerens.

No single word for “meaning-seeking”. You asked for Latin, not Greek.

Mehrdad, canım, I don’t know. I will guess, but whatever I guess, Dimitris Almyrantis will guess better.

Here goes.

• The usual answer is, Iran is at a crossroads of civilisations. Maybe. But you know, so is Greece, so is Turkey, so is Russia, so is Spain. In itself, that’s not actually an answer; it’s only the beginnings of an answer.
• Like many countries, Iran has ethnic spillover at its borders—Kurds next to Iraqi Kurdistan, Arabs in Khuzestan. That’s only a small part of it.
• Iran was in the pathway of a major population movement, that of the Turkic peoples. Unlike Turkey, that did not result in a demographic takeover: the Persian ethnicity was well-established and prestigious, and the Azeris and Turkmens were not waging a war of cultural or religous conquest when they arrived. But it did result in the Torki being a sizeable and secure minority.
• Iran was ruled by a multiethnic empire until fairly recently, which did not particularly care about how Farsi or Torki you were. (At least, that’s what you and Pegah tell me!)
• Multiethnic empires facilitated internal migration of different ethnic groups: hence the Georgians and Armenians in Fereydan (which is nowhere near the Caucasus), or the Circassians imported by the shahs.
• Iran did not have time or incentive to embrace the strongly centralising, “One Ethnicity One Nation” ideal that took hold of much of Europe. So there was not much opportunity for Persians to assimilate other ethnicities—even those closest to them, such as the Mazandaranis or Gilakis, let alone the Lurs.

So: some accidents of history, including the movement of the Turkic peoples; multi-ethnic empire; and lack of overt assimilatory policies. Shi’a religion and common cultural heritage, rather than ethnicity, have been entrusted with the role of binding Iran together.