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No different to other colloquial registers of English: stressed you is “you”, unstressed you is “ya”.

That’s how Leonard Cohen did all his rhymes with Hallelujah, after all: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/l…

I finally worked this out, by reading half of Ancient Greek accent – Wikipedia. (Reading the other half confirms it, but I’m still proud of myself.)

The answer is: the second element if acute, the first if circumflex.

Let’s take this slow.

The explanation of the distinction between acute and circumflex in the Wikipedia article is based not on contours on a vowel, but on high/low contrast on Morae (what a long vowel has two of, and a short vowel has one of). And I gotta admit, that’s the first time an explanation of Greek accent has made sense to me.

So. Let’s ignore grave. Short vowels can only take an acute. That is a high pitch on a single mora:

έ = ˥e.

A long vowel can take an acute. That is interpreted as a high pitch on the second mora:

ή = ɛ˥ɛ

μή = mɛ˥ɛ

You’re going from neutral pitch to high pitch. That will of course sound like rising pitch.

A long vowel can instead take a circumflex. That is interpreted as a high pitch on the first mora:

ῆ = ˥ɛɛ

In context, a circumflexed vowel is a neutral pitch mora, followed by a high pitch mora, followed by a neutral pitch mora; e.g.

καλῆτε = ka.lɛɛ.te

That will sound like a circumflex: rising then falling.

So. Diphthongs involve two short vowels. (There’s also long diphthongs, which are the things with iota subscripts.)

Two short vowels are two morae.

So it’s the same. αί has high pitch on the second mora (i.e. second vowel):

αί = a˥i

αῖ has high pitch on the first mora (i.e. first vowel):

αῖ = ˥ai

Now, your question was, if we use contour tones rather than pitch peaks, how do we transcribe it in IPA?

At that point, I myself would prefer to just go with convention, and put the contour tone symbol on the second letter, because that’s what Greek does. But the point here is that the contour tone, in both cases, starts on the first vowel = first mora. So arguably putting it on the first vowel is more accurate.

Didn’t know about the Quora Meme Page, but it’s been inactive for three years anyway.

The Memes of Production blog has just started up. Contributions welcome!

Not quite in the Rage Comic genre, but I’m rather proud of what I came up with as a lowercase rage comic in this post:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you believe Quora moderation is doing a good and responsible job of maintaining this site’s policies? Why or why not?

I gave a sketch here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are the pros and cons of the Erasmian pronunciation?

Erasmian is an early reconstruction of Ancient Greek. Compared to our current reconstruction, it’s not as distant from modern Western European languages, and it gets modified for ease of teaching in different countries.

Erasmian as taught tends to make the following concessions. (Happy to be corrected.)

• Usually stress rather than pitch accent
• Often fricatives rather than aspirated stops
• Nativisation of diphthongs
• Some distortions in the German version
• Even more distortions in the French version

Assume bug. Happened to me too.

Presumably related bug: Views are decreasing! by Vishal Katyal on Rage against Quora. Views stats dropped on 18 Dec, reported on the 18th.

Where are my views? by Morgan Evans on Rage against Quora: disappeared on the day.

Pegah is an IT student, in her early twenties, living in a town in Iranian Azerbaijan. (She’s mentioned it here, and it wasn’t Tabriz, but I’m not doxing her. Besides, Quora Search.) She is a metalhead, she by her own admission finds it difficult to smile for photos, she has genocidal urges against men, and she is a… no, it would be inconceivable for her to be an unbeliever: she is a potato-chip worshipper.

(From one of her posts, saying that you can be a potato-chip worshipper, and the mullahs will leave you alone in Iran, so long as you don’t challenge their authority.)

I met Pegah via our mutual friend Lyonel Perabo, who has his own… fantastical account of Pegah as another response here.

Pegah is likely the best known Iranian on Quora. Certainly the best known to me. And Pegah plays a valuable role on Quora, of explaining Iranian and Azeri attitudes, Iranian daily life, Azeri and Iranian culture, to outsiders.

But to reduce Pegah to an Iranian, or an Azeri, or an explainer, is to insult her, and I will not. Not because she’ll threaten me, whatever our banter might indicate. But because I respect her. And because we’ve had wonderful exchanges here, trying to work out how similar our respective cultures are; swapping YouTube videos, quoting poems, and recognising the joy it gave us to share them with each other.

Pegah’s name means Dawn, but she’s not a daybreak; she’s a burning noon. She is passionate, and she is acerbic, and she is proud. It’s the pride that I admire most, all the more because it is tempered through her cynicism. She is proud to be Torki, and proud to be Irani, and proud to be a metalhead, and proud to be a potato-chip worshipper (or whatever that is code for).

And she would be a proud, burning noon wherever she was brought up. Being a member of a large minority in the Islamic Republic of Iran might give her cynicism an extra edge; but she’d be both proud and cynical (a potent combination) wherever she was brought up.

We had an exchange maybe last month, where I marvelled that we got along so well, when a century ago she would be my sworn enemy as a Greek; and Pegah protested. Surely we could have been common enemies against the Ottoman Empire.

No, Pegah, I know how religious communities within the Ottoman Empire worked. We massacred and banished our own fellow Greeks for being Muslims, after all, and they weren’t even Torki.

But thank you for suggesting we should have been allies. I would have been honoured to have someone as proud as Pegah as a sworn enemy then. And I’m honoured to count her among my friends now.

(You need to post more, though, Pegah. I miss your voice here.)

I’m leaving out of my answer the role of mtf transgender performers in the transaction—on which see Do real transsexuals and “shemale porn” have nothing in common?, and the transactionality, on which see Is it wrong of me to enjoy “shemale” porn? I know it’s degrading and fetishizing, but what can I do about the fact that I like it?

Uncontroversially, I trust: some cis het men enjoy mtf transgender porn, and some cis het men are repulsed by it.

And that’s spelling out stuff your question didn’t, OP. I don’t know what the stats are on cis gay men enjoying mtf transgender porn. Or for that matter transgender people enjoying it. (Then again, I don’t have the stats on cis het men; I trust someone does, at Pornhub if nowhere else.)

That’s not really the interesting question, and I surmise not the question OP is actually getting at. The question is more, what kind of cis het men enjoy mtf transgender porn—and, more interesting still: what does that tell us about their construction of heterosexuality, and femininity?

Bear in mind that the performers in TS porn are a subset of transgender performances of sexual identity, which themselves are a subset of queer sexual identities.

• TS porn involves women who have transitioned mtf, but almost never involves them having gender-affirming “bottom surgery” (I can think of only one performer, and she was already established).
• TS porn involves women who for the most part embrace the social characteristics of femininity (long hair, breasts, makeup): they are not drag performers, who identify as men and satirise the construct, or genderfluid people, whose performance of sexual identity is deliberately ambiguous.
• TS porn involves transwomen performing solo, with cismen or transwomen, much more than it involves them performing with ciswomen.

What kind of cis het men like TS porn?

Men who are still, at some level, het (or bi). They are attracted to performances of femininity. To be blunt, they are much more comfortable with someone who looks like a women performing fellatio or receiving anal sex, than they would be with a macho bearded man doing so.

There is a societal and a narrowly biological understanding of femininity from the cis het perspective. Viewers of TS porn may be confronted to realise that their construct is broader than just narrowly biological. (Those whose construct isn’t will be repulsed by TS porn, and won’t consume it further.) Of course, porn is always about kink, and that’s part of the kink. The kink clearly exists. (It explains where there are almost no “post-op” performers.) But the kink doesn’t do as much as you might think to undermine heterosexuality.

Hence complaints about TS porn adhering to a heteronormative construct of femininity or attractiveness. Hence why there are few performers who don’t look overtly feminine (though non-zero). Hence, if you think about it, why there are relatively few scenes involving mtf women and cis women.

Of course, mtf women are also shows as tops, both of transwomen and of cis men. It’d be interesting to see whether as many cis het men are OK with those depictions: they pose a bit more of a challenge to heteronormativity. But then again, so does pegging.

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Elliott Mason brings up the question Does being attracted to transgender women who have penises, or porn involving them, mean a man is gay? This is a rich source of information, in some part because it has been overenthusastically merged.

Well, let’s put it this way:

And can you imagine the delighted reaction that would get at work tomorrow!

I’m actually shielded from the worse of the new terror of credentialism, because I obsessively bio’d myself about everything I regularly write on. Let us suppose I am adding a new topic to respond to . Well, that’s not as painful as I feared:

But of course, picking a bio relating to the existing topics of a question was not broken, and no, it did not need to break now, and no, I will not scroll through the dozens of bios I’ve built up.

Quora UI. And of course, this is the debugged version, as Peter Hawkins points out.

For my meme on the subject, see: Quora Credentials by Nick Nicholas on The Memes of Production

If the question is not trolling but is still polemical, and I disagree, then part of my answer will be dedicated to dismantling its assumptions. And I might make an aside at the OP.

But there have been many seemingly silly questions, for which I have given serious answers. I like to treat them as springboards.