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• Explicit predicate structure of arguments. Which throws natural language notions of case out the window (although prepositions are included as well): it really is a matter of argument #1, argument #2, rather than accusative, dative, etc.
• Very explicit, computer-parsable syntax, with spoken brackets for syntactic structures.
• Logical, rather than natural language, notions of negation. (Again, more natural representations are included alongside it.)
• Berserk allomorphy in compounding, and no distinction between derivational morphology and compounding.
• Differentiations in determiners that are also very logicish and independent of definiteness.
• No substantial noun/verb distinction (the terms are avoided in Lojban); a noun is just a verb with a determiner, and thus can have tense or mood the same as a verb.
• Locative as well as temporal tense and aspect, and explicit Vendlerian categories of aktionsart.

Well, this one has worked out well for me. More or less. 🙂

Banter.

The coupling of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing is the coupling that’s brought me to tears. To me, that’s the marriage of true minds.

Am I surprised?

Well, let me put up my latest reaction when I discovered a correspondent was a teen. And she’s been very, very far from the first:

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-eve…

> Anyway, with regard to your question: I am seventeen, so only a year older than you.

OH FOR MOTHER FUCK’S SAKE!

ANOTHER BRILLIANT TEENAGER ON QUORA!

What is it in the water these days?! I was convinced you were in your thirties.

(That was intended as a compliment btw. But yes, I am shocked.)

Dr Nick. Smooth as ever.

But yes, I am surprised.

There’s a great old Greek expression “your brains have not yet congealed” (δεν έπηξε ακόμα το μυαλό σου), meaning that you don’t yet have the impulse control or “maturity” of an adult. Unfortunately neurology confirms that impulse control doesn’t settle until one’s mid twenties. Which is why Australians will maliciously say that a computer program “crashes more often than a 20-year old in a [Ford] Commodore”.

I will say that I very occasionally espy some elements of emotional immaturity among the intellectual teens I follow here. (And it reassures me when that does happen, that I’m not caught in some Hyperborean simulacrum.) But it’s actually quite rare. Quite astonishingly rare.

Um… positivity?

… You’ve A2A’d the right guy, Diane? OK. I’m a misery guts, but I appreciate the challenge!

---

It was my honeymoon, last year. For her sins, I dragged my honey to my home town in Greece. I wanted her to know where I grew up.

I hadn’t been back in six years; and I hadn’t gotten to properly explore it on my previous visits back. I was trying to recapture what it was like thirty years ago, for my honey. But it kept slipping through my fingers. It seems so much smaller. Much more sullen—not just because it was in winter, but it was in the winter of Greece, resigned after years of economic crisis. The town has grown; but it seemed to me to have grown hollow.

I was dejected.

My honey instinctively knew the answer.

She took me to an eatery. Not a tourist place; a hole in the wall place, with an Asterix shopfront.

And top of the menu in the eatery is the homeliest, most unpretentious, most quotidian of dishes a Greek knows. Makaronia me kima. Spag bol. Steaming, with mincemeat, and grated white cheese.

Thank you, honey.

You can go back home, after all.

Vote #1 Colin Jensen and Joe Fessenden, who have nailed it.

To add a bit.

It is the height of arrogance to fast forward to Modern Greek. But I’ll do so anyway.

In Modern Greek, the adjective askhimos < askhēmōn means ‘ugly’.

The etymology of askhēmōn is ‘un-shape-ish’. So unshapely, not with a nice shape. Deformed, as Thayer’s Lexicon put it. Not pleasant to look at.

The verb askhēmonein means ‘to act in an unshapely manner’. To act ugly. In a way that is not pleasant to experience.

You need to dig beneath the Olde English of unbecomingly, unseemly. They are correct, but you may well miss the connotations because they are Olde English. To act unbecomingly mean acting in a socially unacceptable way. It is a socially ugly way.

From the Byzantine usage I’ve seen, I’m pretty sure that includes behaviour which society (at the time) condemned as lewd, sexually ill-disciplined. But it’s not just about the sex, it’s about the ugliness.

FWIW, the LSJ (Classical Greek) definition of the verb is ‘behave unseemly, disgrace oneself’.

Preamble:

I AM NOT SAYING THIS JUST TO IMPRESS User.

Ahem.

Um, nah. It’s not objectively ugly. What name is? It’s just a bunch of phonemes. Is Melanie ugly, because it sounds like melanoma? Is Mycroft ugly, because it sounds like Microsoft?

Any ugliness we associate with names is cultural. And what’s an Anya ever done to you?

I could put in an anecdote about an Anya my wife studied with; but Quora is googleable, so I’ll pass.

What Anya is though, is unfamiliar in an English-language environment. If an English-speaking shmuck in high school hears an unfamiliar name, of course they’re going to scramble to find things about it to make fun of. Because they’re shmucks.

Now, pronouncing it as “Awnya” instead of “Ahnya”: that, I might take issue with…

My bio for Esperanto says Kabeinta Esperantisto, lingvisto: “Esperantist who has done a Kabe, linguist” (for explanation on Kabe, see question details). So I guess I qualify to answer.

I have been corresponding with Clarissa Lohr a fair bit in Esperanto recently. I don’t think that means I’ve un-Kabe’d though; Clarissa is hardly a verda batalanto. She is a Green Warrior, but that’s Green as in hair colour, the environment, and Social Justice, not Green as in Sub la sankta signo de l’ espero (La Espero).

So, how does it feel to have abandoned the Esperanto movement?

Guilt, mostly. Not debilitating guilt like I feel for Lojban (where I was a much bigger deal, as it was a much smaller group). But guilt. They were my people, and I did not stick by them.

Also: Surprise, when I see the language has moved on past me. I Kabe’d in the 90s, distracted by shinier objects (Lojban, then Klingon); Esperanto went off and coined new Esperanto slang. Without my permission. The nerve!

But Esperanto made me, in a lot of ways. Not least of which was poetics. And I’m grateful for that, forever.

I got thunderstorm asthma (who even knew that was a thing?), so I sympathise, Chad.

But not enough not to come up with my own parasitic rendering. Ha!

I’m going with your initial instinct:

Ne heri hodie destruat.

Subjunctives. They are cool.

In my last lecture of Historical Linguistics, I brought in a guest lecturer, a fellow PhD student, who was an ardent Nostraticist. I hadn’t discussed Nostratic with him for years. To my astonishment, I watched him recant Nostratic right before my eyes. And the way he did it was by making fun of Starostin et al., grasping for cognates.

What do *I* think about Nostratic? It’s plausible, and it uses the comparative method, which the long range Greenbergian macrofamilies do not. It’s not generally accepted, and the scepticism is warranted given the time depth and the likelihood of noise in the data. Unproven, but wouldn’t be horrified if it turned out true. But hard to see, given current attitudes and the tenuousness of the relations, what it would take for to be proven true…

Not… feeling it with these answers. Not putting themselves enough in the homophobe’s shoes, I believe.

I think Sophia de Tricht’s is the closest to the answer I’m about to offer, but her answer was pretty epigrammatic.

Consider this: Habib Fanny’s answer to Why do social conservatives care if gay people can marry or trans people can change their names? If they claim to be against government intervention, why don’t they just leave people alone?

A closely related question. From someone who (as Clarissa Lohr just put it to me in a different context) is a bridge: Habib has been on both sides of a culturally divisive issue. And he’s not even invoking God here.

The idea is that these issues are not a matter of identity but a matter of deviancy. Deviancy must be checked because otherwise a society loses its moral compass. And the loss of a moral compass is the death knell of a society. I mean, look at Rome! They were so deviant that they ran their entire civilization into the ground.

Of course, all of this is bollocks. It’s nothing more than people imposing their own narrow-minded sense of morality on an entire population on the pretense that civilization would otherwise collapse. But I hope you understand the thought process behind it a bit better after reading this.

What joy do homophobic people find when they’re being homophobic?

They think they’re saving the world.

Are you scratching your head and muttering? Go ahead. But if you want to know what a homophobe gets out of homophobia, surely you have to get inside their head.