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• Two or three lectures spent on understanding the axes of the IPA charts: place of articulation, manner of articulation; vowel height, frontness, and rounding.
• A round of the class all calling out the cardinal vowels in unison. /iiiii eeeee ɛɛɛɛɛ æææææ, uuuuu ooooo ɔɔɔɔɔ ɑɑɑɑɑ/. I got to make my first year students do that, when my turn came. Good times, good times.
• Learning the values that fill the slots in the charts then comes remarkably easily, once you’ve grokked the axes. Most are reasonably mnemonic.

A2A Pegah Esmaili

Pegah, canım, you don’t expect an ordinary answer from me, do you? Like Cleopatra (meh, inbred Greek), or Catherine the Great (she’d fricking squash me) or Joan of Arc (back away from the crazy)?

Good. Because you’re not going to get one.

In the modern cornucopia of female objectification, do straight men need to go back centuries to fantasise about getting it on with someone? As Lyonel Perabo’s answer well illustrates, no we do not. (Although Lyonel, I must correct you. Ariella Ferrera being 37 years old does not make her a “historical person”. The word you’re looking for there is MILF.)

Now look what you made me do, Pegah. How am I going to save face after that?

Maybe with this answer. Let’s see.

It is a naive fantasy to have, to my mind, and I’ve only allowed myself that fantasy once, in my teens.

Helen Waddell

– Daily Muse – Inspiring Hellen Waddell Conference…

If you’re interested to learn about amazing, strong, intelligent women from the past then this conference at Queen’s University is sure to inspire you!

Great, so my adolescent fantasy is going to annoy several departmentfuls of Women’s Studies students.

Grace Henry-PORTRAIT OF HELEN WADDELL

Whaddaya mean, “The auction is over for this item. The auctioneer wasn’t accepting online bids for this item.” I call shenanigans!

Animals in the Desert

I don’t care if that blog is about desert monks. Yes, she’s a geek. And she’s fricking glorious!

OK. I’ll settle down now.

Helen Jane Waddell (31 May 1889 – 5 March 1965) was an Irish poet, translator and playwright. […] She is best known for bringing to light the history of the medieval goliards in her 1927 book The Wandering Scholars, and translating their Latin poetry in the companion volume Medieval Latin Lyrics. […] A prize-winning biography of her by the Benedictine nun Dame Felicitas Corrigan was published in 1986.

In 1986, I was 15. I read the Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, and I read the Wandering Scholars. And then I read the biography.

And as an unenlightened callow youth in the dim dark ages of the patriarchal 80s, I thought it a terrible thing that someone with such fearsome erudition, with such delicate poetic sensibility, with such a clear sense of what was beautiful and lovely about life and romance and scholarship and redemption, and everything that the mediaeval Latin poets wrote about, should live out her days alone. And I wished I could have been with her to share all that with her.

And you know. Get it on like Donkey Kong too, if the chance came up.

I’m a little better informed now, I trust. She may have been devout and she may have chosen to be alone, but that does not mean her cheeks were never flushed; she wrote too knowingly for that. As Wikipedia writes, she had longterm relationships, including being the “other woman” with Siegfried Sassoon. (I wonder how I missed that at 15: did the nun leave it out?) She was a PhD back when being a female PhD was positively dangerous. She hardly needed me to go back in time and rescue her, and she hardly lacked for people to share her verses with.

But yeah. If I had to pick, I’d pick someone with poetry in their blood, an awkward smile, and gentle donnish erudition. Someone like Helen Waddell.

Hello all the good people, Clarissa and Audrey and Brian. I was going to join in to your discussion under Brian’s answer, but it didn’t head in the direction I was hoping.

Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller, who are the deaf–blind people Brian alludes to, communicated through finger spelling, read Braille, and wrote. Must have been hideously slow. But still, that was all the language they had; and I don’t see how we would usefully say they are language-deprived. They had a language faculty, and their language production was entirely in order. (It certainly helped that they acquired fingerspelling as children.)

If deaf kids can acquire language through a signed modality, and we call them native speakers of a sign language, I don’t see why we can’t say Bridgman and Keller didn’t acquire language through a tactile modality, and the language they acquired was pretty much written English. (This was after all the 19th century.)

Audrey, you’re not agreeing with the premiss I see, but neither of us know enough about deaf–blind language acquisition to have a debate on this. But I did not have the impression that Bridgman and Keller were one-offs; the impression I have is that deaf–blind kids acquire language all the time. What I don’t know is whether there too the primary language acquired, through tactile means, is abbreviated compared to written English—leaving out determiners, for example.

I don’t think it’s quite what Z-Kat was after. But I do think it establishes his scenario as feasible.

Should we get rid of <c>? In what language? Azeri? But then, Mehrdad, how will I call Pegah Esmaili canım? I’d have to call her djanım. And that doesn’t look anywhere as nice. It looks almost as bad as τζάνουμ.

Philip Newton’s answer to Should we get rid of the letter C? has the right answer. And you know, the English spelling system truly is one of the most stupid orthographies in existence (but don’t get me started on Kanji), but… I like that it’s got so much historical detritus in it. It’s like doing an archaeological dig, every time you write a shopping list.

Sucks if you’re not a native reader, of course.

The edit logs gives you access to something their feed doesn’t: their comments.

If I like what someone has to say in their answers, I’ll follow them: I won’t go to check their comments, I’ll be seeing them live soon enough.

There are three circumstances in which I’ll check someone’s edit log.

• I haven’t heard from someone in a while, and I’m checking if they’re back yet. I’m doing that with someone now. Do come back, Person Whose Identity I’m Not Divulging.
• I’m bored, and I want an extra dose of someone’s Quora goodness.
• I suspect someone is being a troll or malcontent, and I want to make sure. Especially important if someone never answers and only comments. Also handy if the rest of what they say is sensible, so you don’t necessarily dismiss them completely.

This actually isn’t my own dislike, but it’s a dislike that really struck me.

My father left Cyprus in 1966. He was in tears the day that Archbishop Makarios III died. I’ve only been back to Cyprus twice, in 1979 and 1989, and briefly and superficially at that.

So I don’t have a clear notion of how Cyprus has evolved and changed, from a colonial backwater of popular revolt, to… well, to what it is now.

I was friends a decade ago with a Serbian postdoc. Before coming to Melbourne, he’d spent time at the University of Cyprus, in Nicosia.

Now, to my eyes, this statue of Makarios at the Archbishopric of Cyprus:

is a reasonable and respectful depiction of the Father of the Nation:

But my friend Vlado did not alight in the Cyprus of 1961. He alighted in the Cyprus of 2005, and he alighted from Serbia, a place where people are skeptical of religious leadership. (In fact they’re skeptical of religious leadership now in Cyprus, too.) And a place where people are even more skeptical about monumental depictions of national leaders.

So he made merciless fun to me of Mecha-Makarios, trampling the streets of Nicosia and crushing all underneath.

That really was a shock to me. But you know, his eyes are probably clearer in this than mine would be.

You mean, other than yours, Habibi le toubibi?

And mine? (Nick Nicholas: loved him so much, they named him twice.)

Zeibura S. Kathau ranks highly. Quora Search, so I can’t find where he explained how he came up with it; but the Zeibura is his invention, and it’s arresting. I’m normally culturally reactionary enough to sneer at such things, but his moniker makes a lot of sense to me. It’s got Zzzing, and Burrrrrragadocio, and Mitteleuropa goodness all over it.

Admittedly, it makes more sense to me with him living in Czechia, than if he’d stayed in Britain. 🙂

Modern Greek speakers tend to squirm when addressed in the politeness plural, unless they are deliberately being high and mighty. The politeness plural connotes negative, not positive politeness to them, and emphasises social distance. Greeks don’t like social distance, they like being friendly and in your face. The exception these days would be officialdom and other explicit hierarchies, and even there, I’m stretched to think how much of that survives. I suspect it survives more in the Church.

As a diasporan, I approach new acquaintances in Greece online, using the politeness plural a fair bit. They will put up with it in the first exchange, and no longer. The explicit signal to cut it out, if you persist, is στον ενικό, είπαμε. “I told you: singular!”

Sicut alicubi dixit medicus bonus Habibus Magnus: Confiteor.

[As the good doctor Habib the Great has put it elsewhere: “I Confess”]

[Hey, it’s not my fault Habib chose to quote the Catholic Mass in Latin.]

---

You know, Habib le toubib, I’ve been expecting a question like this for maybe a month or two. Since I started interacting non-trivially with both yourself and your brother from another mother, Jeremy Markeith Thompson.

[Is that an instance of racism? I suspect that would be overusing the term, but you tell me.]

It’s been an interesting thread to see, with people lining up to admit that they are all too human—and on occasion, that they are overcompensating and rejecting their ingroup instead of their outgroup.

Riaan Engelbrecht, to my exasperation, has actually summarised quite well what I was about to say here, in his comment to the alicubi answer:

You nailed it, Habib. My emotions are rarely politically correct (warning for the Andrew Weill lightening bolt to strike…).

However, you can train your mind to teach your mouth to shut up long enough to be nice, be reasonable. Sometimes, during this short respite, I have been able to stop and think. Putting myself in the other person’s shoes emotionally has taught me that there is another side to the story.

I have initial emotional reactions that count as prejudice. I am aware of them, and I keep my goddamn mouth shut when I do become aware of them, because not being judgemental is a core part of who I seek to be.

The emotional reactions are, for the most part, fear of the unfamiliar. They are real, and they dissipate soon enough—as I become more familiar.

When I first arrived back in Australia (age 12), I stared at the 7–11 store owner next door, who was Korean. First time I’d seen an Asian; Tasmania was quite whitebread, and so was Crete. If you stare at Asians in Australia though, you’re not going to get anything else done in your day: they have similar numbers to Blacks in the US. Similarly, I used to stare at Somalis when they first started becoming part of the Australian fabric a decade ago. I don’t stare as much now, because they are becoming more familiar.

There’ll be a little bit of media feeding into my fears. I know I was somewhat anxious when accosted by a black panhandler in Memphis, or walked past groups of drunk Aboriginal young men in Darwin. But I don’t know that I’d be much more comfortable with drunk white young men, or white panhandlers.

(And I did end up making an attempt at banter with the panhandler, at least—earning me a “Where y’all from? Australia? Love that place! Crocodile Hunter! Dollar, please.”)

The primordial Other I was brought up to define myself against, that I catch myself fearing the most, is Turks for Greece, and Aboriginals for Australia. I’ve felt awkward when introduced to Aboriginals in Australia; I’ve kept my mouth shut, and soon enough ended up in friendly discussion with them. By contrast, I was positively giddy on my playdate with a Turkish guy a couple of weeks ago (and Quora truly helped me with that in advance)—which is progress against what I would have felt like 30 years ago. But yeah, there’s been a little bit of work needed for me to get over any blockers.

The only other thing I can think of is that I suspect I don’t find non-Caucasians physically attractive in the same proportions that I do Caucasians. That’s explicable as a familiarity thing: I don’t particularly go for blondes either—though for some reason, redheads fascinate me. But the list of non-Caucasians I do find physically attractive, I hasten to add, is certainly non-zero.

Jeremy, you can ask me specifics later… 🙂

Not δυνατότερο. One, because that’s Modern Greek, not Ancient; Two, because Modern Greek doesn’t have a distinct word for “loud”, it just uses the word for “strong”, dynatos. (In fact the OP’s form is “stronger, louder”.)

Actually looking at Woodhouse’s English-Ancient Greek Dictionary, Ancient Greek isn’t much better. The words given for “loud” are literally: big, sharp, clear-sounding, upright, bitter, piercing, over-toned, shining, noisy, roaring (of waves), sonorous. They’re mostly ambiguous, which disqualifies them for me.

Gegōnocracy, “rule of the sonorous” is the least ambiguous as a word, but it would end up ambiguous in English with gegonocracy “rule of facts (what has happened)”; in fact, I wasn’t familiar with the adjective gegōnos.

If I had to pick one, I’d go with rhothiocracy, “rule of those roaring like waves”. I don’t love it, it’s not actually that commonly used of people. But Aristophanes did use it to refer to popular acclamation (albeit in a mariner context): “raise loud waves of applause in his favour this day” (Knights 546)

My preference would be to go with shouting as the root notion here, certainly out-shouting your opposition: “Rule of Shouting”. Boo-cracy (< bo-ē) is ambiguous with the Rule of Oxen (< bo-os), though that may be a feature and not a bug. (EDIT, h/t John Gragson: maybe instead Boēto-cracy “Rule of the Shouty”.)

Craugo-cracy (< krazō, kraugazō) works best for me, and a kraugē is typically an angry, not a joyful shout.