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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.

Well, linguistics is the scholarly discipline whose subject matter is language.

Historical linguistics is the scholarly discipline whose subject matter is the development of language through time. It explains language in terms of how it historically developed to get to this point (its diachrony).

Up until the 1920s, historical linguistics was the mainstream of linguistics. Saussure, himself an important historical linguist, identified that language is a system which needs to be made sense of on its own terms, as a contemporary phenomenon (its synchrony).

This led to Structuralism, which uncovered a lot of the structures of language that Historical Linguistics had missed, because they were treating language as a process and not a system. Historical Linguistics for example did not really differentiate phones and phonemes; it didn’t need to. The distinction is essential to phonology. And after Structuralism, other approaches to linguistics have continued to be synchronic.

Historical linguistics has been marginalised in all of this, and is very much niche now. Historical linguistics has been enriched by our better understanding of synchronic linguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. But it is unfortunately out of fashion, with a lot of shortsighted linguists thinking it’s boring and old hat.

Fashion. Never forget that all of scholarship—not just the squishy humanities, but the sciences as well—are about fashion. There are fields of inquiry that fall out of fashion, and it’s not always for objectively sound reasons.

What you’re after is a country with an exaggeratedly strong nationalism, to the point of chauvinism, but not spilling over into racism. So you want a maxed out civic nationalism.

France invented civic nationalism, but they asssimilated all their indigenous minorities aggressively, and they’ve botched their assimilation of the Beurs, so that’s not a good example.

I’ve lived in three countries, Australia, America, and Greece, all with healthy chauvinism.

Greece.

There is a (popular?) school of thought in Greece that is xenophobic and racist. There is an (elite?) school of thought in Greece that emphasises culture over ethnicity, and exults that as long as you embrace our culture, you’re one of us. And they trot out Isocrates, Panegyricus §50 to support that: Isocrates

I have no problem accepting what Wikipedia says—that this is not what Isocrates meant at all, and the passage was actually an assertion of Athenian cultural chauvinism. And I don’t care. It’s a valid viewpoint, not because Isocrates did or didn’t say it, but because civic nationalism is a healthy thing that the Balkans needs more of.

Historically, “people are called Greeks because they share in our education” is what’s happened with the Arvanites and the Vlachs, to mention the two “loyal minorities”. And my (elite?) heart rejoices, when I see little second generation Zaireans speaking in Greek slang. Or knowing that the Nigerian Dr. Sam Chekwas so fell in love with Greek culture while he studied there, that he ran the only Greek bookstore in Astoria NY (Greektown, America), for decades.

You know the Greek Nazis chanting Δε θα γίνεις έλληνας ποτέ, Αλβανέ, Αλβανέ? (“You’ll never be a Greek, Albanian!”)

Those fuckers will never be as Greek as Dr Sam Checkwas.

… But. That’s the elite storyline. I think the popular storyline is winning. And that Greek nationalism is contaminated with racism.

Australia

Australian nationalism was contaminated with racism from the beginning. The White Australia policy wasn’t an aberration, it was part of what defined both the Commonwealth of Australia and the Australian labour movement.

It got up-ended in the late seventies, by the elite. The elite defined Australia to have civic nationalism. That was the actual point of multiculturalism—a point lost on the masses, who think it was only about “um… cuisine?”

Once again, I rejoice in that civic nationalism. I rejoice that I can be proud to be a citizen of this country, without having to genuflect at the altar of Damper (food) and Aussie Rules. I rejoice that no fucker gets to tell me “Go back to where you came from”.

But that’s a luxury of Greeks now being pretty well assimilated (I’m an outlier generationally—my parents came here at the end of the wave, and I spent time growing up in Greece). As you may know from the news, plenty of Australians never stopped telling people to Go back to where they came from; they just have been targeting more recent arrivals. And blocking even more.

So Australia’s not off the hook either.

America.

The US, too, was founded on racism.

But you tell me, American Quorans. Can an African-American, despite the lynchings and the whips, despite the microaggressions and the macroaggressions, despite feeling besieged and occupied in their own country—look at the flag, and still say “USA! Fuck yeah!”?

If they can, Dimitris, you have your answer.

For every meme, there is an equal and opposite, except even dumber meme. But somehow…

… I think the existence of this meme means something.

The mob will vote for what the mob likes. And the Quora Facebook feed will give the mob what it wants.

You’re Anon, which automatically makes you the enemy unless you’re that one Anon guy talking about Turkish, or that other Anon guy who is actually me; but I’ll answer.

Be the change.

Upvote the voices you like. Follow them and encourage them.

Know that they won’t get a mass readership, and that’s actually probably just as well. But for the topics you’re passionate about, curate good quality conversation. That includes A2Aing and asking good questions.

Post questions like, I dunno, Who are the 3 people you follow that have the fewest followers? How many followers do they have, and what are your reasons for following them? (Thank you again for the idea, Martin Silvertant.)

The Just-So story of antiquity is as Konstantinos Konstantinides put it: Thera the island was named for its colonist Theras, and Therasia for his daughter.

Yeah, I find that too convenient too.

I’m not looking up Pauly or anything reputable like that, but I will work from the corresponding common nouns. Thēr means a wild animal, and thēra meant the hunt, hunting for wild animals, game. Thērasios is the adjective of thēra, “of or relating to the hunt”. The feminine of Thērasios is Thērasia. So “hunt” and “hunting (island)”.

Oh, and Theresa does indeed come from the similar adjective Thēresios. It started out as a synonym of Artemis, the hunter goddess.

Melbourne isn’t Sydney, with its really obvious, beautiful sights. It doesn’t really have any obvious, landmark attractions. It’s more atmosphere and aggregate of experience.

In the CBD: walk around the alleyways for the funky graffiti and nouveau restaurants. Stare up, and admire the Victorian and Art Deco goodness of a confident, rich city.

Walk down Southbank, especially in decent weather (when that happens): it’s a lovely, bustling promenade.

Pop up to Lygon Street, Little Italy, for the gelati and coffee culture; less now for the students from Melbourne Uni, because uni students aren’t as interesting as they used to be.

Go down to the St Kilda pier for a stroll along the beach (such as it is, this is Melbourne after all), and take in the self-conscious bohemia of Fitzroy St and Acland St. You didn’t live here in the 90s, so you won’t feel the stabbing pain in Acland St of what it used to be: a slice of the shtetl turned into deracinated hipsterville. Just enjoy the hipsterville show. If it gets too much, the shtetl is still around the corner in Carlisle St.

Walk through the myriad of public gardens and parks. The Botanical Gardens, the Fitzroy Gardens, Flagstaff.

Go to the ethnic enclaves. Little Greece in Oakleigh; Little Vietnam in Richmond; Little Turkey in Brunswick St, Little Spain in Johnston St. Eat, and eat widely: we have a critical mass of culinary diversity, and culinary innovation.

You want an island that’s a little out of the way of mass tourism, so you can see some local music and culture. Or an island that’s big enough that not every part of it is soaked with mass tourism.

You won’t see much, this is 2016 after all. And as I posted here (Nick Nicholas’ answer to What should I know (but don’t) about the culture and history of the Cyclades in general and Syros in particular?), the indigenous dialect of the Cyclades (the most archetypal Greek islands) died out a century ago.

I actually haven’t done the Greek islands, partly because that’s exactly the kind of thing I’d be looking for, myself. I’ll make a wild guess:

• Of the Ionian islands, not Corfu, probably not Zante. Maybe Cephalonia.
• Of the Northern Aegean, Thasos and Samothrace definitely (but why would a tourist want to? 🙂 , likely Lemnos. Lesbos is big enough that there are traditional bits left, and even visible differences within the island (I’ve been there), but you have to hunt them down.
• I don’t even think of Euboea as an island, but: Euboea.
• Of the Cyclades, I’d go with any island you haven’t heard of. Folegandros, maybe, or Amorgos. But I’m guessing here.
• Of the Dodecanese, I suspect all of them; 11 of the 12 are tiny and out of the way, and the 12th, Rhodes, is big enough that something indigenous will have survived the tourists.
• Crete. Of course. Not the coast around Iraklion. Ever. But the hinterland? Yes.