Will I get a notification if someone mentions me in the comments of some other answer? If no, how can I do the same?

Mention by @-citation of my name inside a comment was working in generating notifications for me, until mid October 2016.

It’s not working for me currently; interested in hearing of others’ experience.

As is often the case in Quora, hard to tell if the new state of affairs is meant to be a bug or a feature.

Would you agree with me to downvote any answer which doesn’t allow comments?

I resent the universal blocking of comments by those who don’t want to have a two way discussion on any of their answers, because they think two way discussion is pointless. I’ve bloviated on this several times already; Ernest Adams is the most obvious instance. I don’t downvote him, because his answers are good (though at times supercilious), but I have long stopped upvoting him. And though I haven’t muted such posters yet, muting is a more proper response than downvoting: distaste for comment-blockers is far from universal in Quoradom, and downvoting does have universal impact.

I do not resent the universal blocking of comments by those who have received inordinate abuse, and are trying to stay safe. See Sonya Abarcar’s answer to Do all the popular Quorans receive mean comments? They gotta do what they gotta do, and it’s better than them feeling they have to leave Quora.

I don’t resent those who turn off comments selectively per question (now that the option is available), in response to abuse. Lara Novakov, to take one example of someone, is both very open to non-abusive comments, and disproportionately targeted by islamophobes.

I do resent Jae Alexis Lee for having made me change my mind on this. I can admit to being wrong about an issue; I just don’t like it. 🙂

So, no, OP, I won’t agree with you. And I’m more in sympathy with you than most other likely answerers…

The fight continues

I will not hit your Report button. Posted June 4.

I held out for four months. A good innings. Today, I yielded, and did my first Block-and-Report of a user.

I’m not happy or proud to have recanted on my stance. I have distaste for blocking, and a high threshold for being offended. By virtue of both being privileged and avoiding conflict-ridden topics, I’ve had a relatively easy ride of it here. (There was one Greek zealot who insulted me a fair bit, but he lost interest, and I think he was flattered by the attention when I rebutted him.)

My patience got exhausted today, by another zealot, this time on the unlikely subject of spelling reform. And it was exhausted more by seeing his ad hominems at some random third party, who was actually sympathetic to his viewpoint—but who the zealot was still insulting and belittling for living in England, which owed the world reparations for English spelling or something.

I’m getting more views, so I’ll be getting more unwelcome attention; it’s an inevitability. So I might as well give back to the community by reporting.

Not that I have much confidence in the reporting system’s efficacy. Several in my circle have reported someone wishing a friend cease drawing breath, for making a benign observation about Melania Trump. On Quora, this guy draws breath still. Another friend was threatened with rape here; she reported it, and if it was dealt with, it was certainly not a matter of hours.

And the ludicrous false positives of Quora Reporting continue; they’re getting worse, if anything. Blocks and bans for the most specious of reasons, acting robotically on policies and not prioritising actual hurt.

But I’ve gone back to enabling a broken system. How do I make up for that, and not get banned myself?

I’m launching Necrologue. Make that which is publicly visible more visible. I’ll be posting any blocks or bans I am made aware of, of suitably notable Quorans. (I’m not going to be mentioning sock puppets, for instance.) With no added commentary; all information on users’ edit logs is public, readers can make up their own minds.

It’s something.

Did Greek Cypriot took Venetian caraguol, Spanish caracol with the nuance “fort” to denote a snail (karaolos)?

Thanks to Eutychius Kaimakkamis and Alberto Yagos.

Alberto, you have Andriotis’ etymological dictionary? Awesome!

The Cypriot dictionary I opened up at random confirms caracol/caracollo as the origin of karaolos, and they confirm your etymology as “twisted”. It did not say that the etymology of caracol in turn was ultimately Greek kokhlias via Vulgar Latin *cochlear, which makes karaolos a round-about Rückwanderer: caracol – Wiktionary

And who knew that the Romance words for spoon have the same derivation.

What’s this about patrolling, though? A caracole is a snail-shaped (i.e. spiral) military manoeuvre or move in dressage. Is it as generic as “patrol”?

How do you refer to your left foot with languages that only use cardinal directions?

To elaborate on Joe Devney’s answer to How do you refer to your left foot with languages that only use cardinal directions?

Yes, your South foot, if you’re facing west, and your North foot, if you’re facing east. Just as geographically oriented languages will refer to it as your seaward foot if you’re by the beach, and as your landward foot if you turn around.

That’s the thing about languages with no relative direction. They really have No. Relative. Direction.

Which means, you might ponder, that they don’t refer to their left foot the same way all the time; how they name it depends on which way they’re facing. Yes it does. They know it’s the same foot, they just shrug off the fact that the name for it changes. Just as you shrug off the fact that your left is the opposite of my left.

In Latin, what is the most correct construction for a question like, “When you say X is Y, what do you mean?”

Cum X (accusative) Y (nominative) esse dicis, quid in mente habes?

EDIT: Sorry, Peter Hansen:

Cum X (accusative) Y (accusative) esse dicis, quid in mente habes?

Is there any psychological journal that is written in Esperanto?

My guess: no.

If anyone would have written articles in an Esperanto psychological journal, that would have been the late Claude Piron, who lectured in psychology, and who also wrote a psychoanalysis of people’s attitude to international languages. (No, I’m not endorsing that kind of thing.)

I’ve looked through his now defunct fan page at Pironejo , Claude Piron: Bibliografio . Not seeing any evidence he published in anything such.

I’m not sure there have been academic journals in Esperanto about anything other than Esperanto (including Esperantologio and Planlingvistiko, which were pretty good).

Is there in linguistics or related areas any notable research about dictionaries themselves?

Muhammad Irfan Perdana and Imre Kovacs are quite right that the art of dictionary-writing is (practical) lexicography.

If you are interested in reflections on past dictionaries, rather than how to write a new one, that is still lexicography. See the references in English lexicology and lexicography – Wikipedia: most of them fall under that category; and in fact any work on how to write a dictionary (practical lexicography) is going to reflect on how dictionaries have been written in the past.

What is an accurate translation of “Exbibl Theol Eccles Liberae Aberdonensi”?

Ex bibl. = Ex bibliotheca. The whole thing is abbreviated:

From the theological library of the Free Church of Aberdeen.

Edit: thinko, I said ex bibliis, but I was getting confused with ex libris, from the books of, which refers to a person’s library.

What is the best and most up-to date Ancient Greek-English dictionary?

Depends on your criteria.

Biggest & Up to date is not English, but the now online DGE Diccionario Griego-Español . Only goes up to epsilon though, and I don’t see it finishing for another century.

Biggest in English remains Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon — though the online editions don’t include the 1996 Supplement.

The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is coming out next year; it’s not meant to be as big as LSJ, but it has been redone from scratch, rather than copypasting previous lexica (a tradition LSJ itself is part of).

The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek came out last year, as a translation of Montanari’s Italian dictionary. I haven’t gone through it; from the headword count, it sounds close to LSJ (more than the original edition, less than original + supplement), and I know that Montanari maintained PAWAG-Poorly attested words in ancient greek, with 1000 words not in LSJ (well, a substantial subset of them, anyway).

It won’t be as comprehensive as DGE, which quite confidently does Proper Names and Early Byzantine texts, an area previous dictionaries have shied away from. But then again, DGE is up to epsilon.