Category: Uncategorized

In their answer to A celebrity had his assistant call to schedule a date with me. Should I be offended?, Sam Murray details their rather agreeable experience of having their one-time Celebrity Fuck Buddy (CFB) arrange dates through an assistant. After all, the CFB was hardly to be trusted to arrange dates on his own.

In comments, Sam added that they found the prospect of arranging logistics pretty hot themselves:

Haha. I like planning weirdly enough. Making reservations is like a blood sport for me. Party of 7 at 8pm at balena on Saturday night? Consider it done. Coordinating hotel reservations with flight times with restaurants with tours with car rentals? I am getting aroused just thinking about it. Lol.

So…

https://www.quora.com/A-celebrit…

I’m sorry to say, Sam, but the paparazzi have been leaking footage of you with your CFB (celebrity fuck buddy). Only fair you should know:

In this cartoon, the role of the CFB is being played by Tom Selleck. Or Eric Braeden. Since I can’t actually draw, I need all the visual cues I can get.

No. To ask a question, you need to log in. When you login, your account reactivates. So you have to deactivate it again afterwards.

As in George Soros?

Likely Esperanto. “He will soar”. Possibly Hungarian: “Next in line”.

His father was called Tivadar Schwartz, and was an important figure in Esperanto culture (Teodoro Ŝvarc): not so much for stuff he wrote (including under the pseudonym Teo Melas—yes, the guy knew his Ancient Greek: Melas = Schwartz = Black), but because he founded Literatura Foiro, the defining Esperanto literary journal.

Having a Jewish name in pre-war Hungary was not a life-enhancing move, and Theo changed the surname in 1936. The Esperanto Wikipedia (George Soros – Vikipedio) is skeptical whether Esperanto was the prime mover behind the surname change; the English Wikipedia (George Soros – Wikipedia) mentions that the palindrome was also attractive.

George Soros was exposed to Esperanto plenty as a kid, though apparently he is not a native speaker, and he doesn’t speak it now. He hasn’t had much to do with the language since his youth, though the Esperanto Wikipedia mentions he was dragged to From Zamenhof to Soros: A Symposium organised by the Universal Esperanto Association in New York, 2010.

A commendable initiative, Martin!

I will of course leave out (a) Facebook friends who never actually did anything here, (b) people I actually don’t remember, and (c) people with answers in the single digits.

3 + 7.

1. Michael Lining. 10 answers, 5 followers

He’s a trumpeter and a recording artist, which should have gotten my follow.

Instead, he got my follow for this:

Michael Lining’s answer to How do you feel about Donald Trump winning the election?

He voted Trump, and he explained why, in a forum he knows is anti-Trump, respectfully and intelligently.

A lot of you are freaking out right now. Hell, a lot of me is freaking out right now. But this guy is not the enemy. This guy is your fellow citizen. And I’m very glad he spoke up.

2. Fırat Aktaş. 16 answers, 9 followers

Because I burst out laughing in a tram, reading Why are Turkish men beautiful?

3. Erdi Küçük. 11 answers, 8 followers

Several good answers on Turkish culture and politics. His answer on Is Atatürk the ideal example of Plato’s philosopher-king? has a very insightful sting.

4. Latinists and Hellenists and Linguists:

James Garry. 57 answers, 9 followers

Classics major. Knows his Latin, knows his Classics. Knows stuff. To my fellow Latinists and Hellenists: he’s one of us.

Ioannis Stratakis. 15 answers, 9 followers

The best reciter of reconstructed Ancient Greek I’ve heard, bar none: podium-arts.com. Well across his Classics. Do not be intimidated by the afro in his profile pic.

Gabriel Bertilson. 11 answers, 3 followers

Hellenist and historical linguist. Too few of us around.

Julien Daux. 23 answers, 8 followers

Knows how French and Hebrew work.

James Cottam. 95 answers, 5 followers

Undergrad classicist at Oxon. Glad to know they still teach them well there.

Diana Vesselinova. 38 answers, 7 followers

Bulgarian linguist. And cat owner.

Nick Sallas. 18 answers, 6 followers.

Sensible, well-informed stuff about Greek, ancient and modern, and Greece; I particularly appreciate his perspective as a heritage language learner.

Because they think a library is not a place of silent study, but a place of either

• group study
• checking your Facebook feed
• socialising
• eating lunch (!)
• or being on the phone to their mates (!!)

Incidentally, having just been subjected to the first three in my local public library, where I came for some peace and quiet,

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE!!!

I don’t care if you’re reciting the periodic table in cute off-the-boat Greek accents. Fuck off and do that at the local café.

The more interesting question is, was it ever thus, and is it everywhere thus? The answer is no. When books were being used in libraries, rather than decorative (so, 20 years ago), there really was a lot less of that.

I’ve already broken up with Mary C. Gignilliat on this one. And made up again.

And we’re not even together.

Days? No. Hours? No.

Mehmet Usta is reputed to be the best Turkish restaurant in town. 47 mins. No problem, I’m there.

I think the longest drive we’ve done (that’s me and my wife, not me and Mary) is 1.5 hrs to a Sardinian place in Yea, Victoria. But the pleasant drive in the country was part of the deal.

Original: Can anyone provide Latin or Greek versions of my Turkish name Mirac Tükenmez?

Hello, not-so-Anonymous!

So. Mirac, Arabic Mi’raj, is Ascension, as in the Ascension of Muhammad into Heaven. This corresponds to the Christian Ascension of Christ into Heaven—as in, one could reasonably use the same name.

The Greek for Ascension in that sense is Analēpsis. Literally, Taking Up. It’s not something Christ did on his own; he was Taken Up by God the Father. Without the trinitarian complications, that would be even more clearly the case for Muhammad.

There is no Ancient Greek name or Saint’s name I can find that derives from Analēpsis. If there were such a name, it would be Analēptos Ἀνάληπτος, “the Taken Up One”.

Tükenmez “Inextinguishable”? Ἄσβεστος Asbestos, of course. Yes, that’s what asbestos means.

Analeptus Asbestus?

I’ll add one variant. I was googling in case anyone has ever used the word Ἀνάληπτος as a name. I found that one guy took the word Ανεπανάληπτος “Unprecedented!”, and turned it into a moniker: Ανέπ Ανάληπητος, Anep Analeptos.

It’s not as good an option, and it’s a Greek in-joke. But there you go.

EDIT: It just occurred to me: people aren’t realising that the pronunciation of Mirac in Turkish is pretty close to Mirage in English. But Mirac in Turkish is a male name. Mirage in English is female, and sounds most like a stripper’s name…

It’s a very good question.

Normally, creoles and pidgins are put in the too hard basket of linguistic family trees for precisely that reason. It’s very hard to argue for a single parent language, as pidgins, and the creoles that arise from them, really are mixed languages, with grammar from the one, vocabulary from the other, and structures from the lowest common denominator. So people are reluctant to say Tok Pisin is either Austronesian or Germanic; they typically put it in a category of its own.

A further complication is that there is almost always a single acrolect (“White”) parent, with the possible exception of Bislama; but any number of basilect (“Black”) parents. Pidgins typically arose in plantations, where slaves or workers spoke a lot of different languages and were torn from their social context. So adopting a pidgin was a matter of necessity.

Linguists tend to dodge the question, and creoles are so distinct from both basilects and acrolects, not to mention so much more similar to each other, that the question is not really that useful. But Multiple Parents is certainly closer to the truth than Single Parent.

At an absolute minimum in Europe, four times. Each time there was a technological advance in book production, the superseded tech books were copied and discarded. Tech advances included:

• The introduction of papyrus
• The introduction of the codex
• The introduction of parchment
• The introduction of lowercase

Not yet in my speech, but you’re pointing out something interesting.

If you pronounce them as a single word, cuzall, cuzawesome, yeah, that’s a proclitic, and that’s grammaticalisation. I don’t.

I do pronounce ’cause as a single syllable often, many do. That’s a reduction, but I think it’s still independently stressed for me, and it’s certainly with a full vowel: coz /kɔz/ (Australian English), not cuz /kəz/. If you’re doing it as a schwa, that’s consistent with more extensive reduction of the word.

If you don’t mind: what’s your English dialect?