Category: Uncategorized

Braille – Wikipedia; English Braille – Wikipedia; Unified English Braille – Wikipedia

Braille is an encoding of alphabets; since the alphabetic repertoire is going to be different within Roman script, let alone other alphabets, there will be differences in the repertoire. Not all Braille alphabets will have a W, or a É, or a Ч. Moreover, Braille includes ligatures of letters and abbreviations; those are very much language-specific, depending on frequency within the language. The English character for <th> corresponds to the German character for <ch>, and the Albanian character for <dh>.

Ideally, each alphabet should have the same sign for A (or equivalent), B (or equivalent) and so forth, using phonetic correspondences where possible, and lining up with French Braille. So at least the core letters are meant to be the same. That has not always been the case, though it has become increasingly the case. American Braille, used until 1918, had not even half the same letters as French Braille in the alphabet.

The non-alphabetic characters of Braille, such as punctuation and symbols, have diverged even within English-language Brailles; hence the very recent adoption of Unified English Braille.

So the answer is no, although it has gotten better in the past century.

Any Goddess of Barley in Greek would be named for the Greek for barley: alphi. That derives from proto-Indo-European *albhi- , and Albanian elp is a cognate.

Albion is the Celtic name of Britain, which survives as the Gaelic for Scotland, Alba. Its cognates are Welsh elfydd < *elbid ‘world, land’ and Gaulish albio– ‘world’. Per Albion – Wikipedia, there are two possible etymologies in proto-Indo-European: *albho- ‘white’ or *alb ‘hill’. I think Pokorny conflates them.

Per Pokorny, one guy (Specht) has speculated that *albhi ‘barley’ and *albho ‘white’ are related. *shrug* Who knows, maybe they are. But given how the Albh– stem shows up all over the place in place names (including the Alfeios river—and the Alps), I’d have thought that any Barley/White connection would be old—and would certainly predate the naming of Albion.

Is it fair for comments to be disabled, to begin with?

Fairness is about reciprocity.

My longstanding policy is to ignore such answers rather than downvote them; then again, I don’t downvote anyone unless the answer is misleading or offensive. But I sympathise with those like Frank Dauenhauer who do.

Note also that, given how blunt Quora’s UI is, the true meaning of upvote and downvote is not “this is an objectively good answer” and “this is an objectively bad answer”. It is “this is an answer that I want to see more of” and “this is an answer I want to see less of”.

(I tried to find chapter and verse in Laura Hale’s writings to back this up, because that’s what I recall her saying, and I can’t. Laura, feel free to chime in. And hey, aren’t you meant to be in town?)

These simple word lookup questions are the bane of anyone who follows a language topic, and they are not differentiated by topic from more substantive questions.

These simple word lookup questions are also Ground Zero for easily Googlable questions, on which see: Is it bad to ask questions on Quora that could easily be answered via a Google search? (Executive Summary: Quora Inc loves them, because they think Quora will replace Google. Many individual users want them to burn in hell.)

Downvoting questions are an acknowledged method to signal questions are low-quality, and a (less widely acknowledged, but necessary) method of controlling your own feed.

Those questions can’t be muted by topic.

They are low quality. Seriously, they are. They only add value to Quora if you think Quora will replace Google (which Adam DiCaprio actually did, in 2010).

I haven’t downvoted them, because I have a very high threshold for downvoting in general. But, IMHO, OP: Be that guy.

Ah, Habib. Other than you, right?

I have an upvote chain (h/t Laura Hale) going with my inner circle of Quora besties. I upvote them because they’re my friends, but then again, they’re my friends because they post good stuff. I do occasionally withhold upvotes from them, usually because I don’t think the answer was up to their usual standards; but I do feel guilty about it.

I’ve already posted who my besties are; the list in I love youse guys is obsolete (four months ago, that’s an eternity in Quora time), but indicative.

I upvote good stuff when I see it, and I do wish Quora mixed up my feed more; I upvote with that hope, and sometimes it works. But regular upvotes and following are positively correlated anyway.

Top 10:

• Pim Fortuyn. That gay guy who hated Muslims and got killed.
• William Of Orange. That guy the Dutch National Anthem is about.
• Antoine van Leeuwenhoek. That microscope dude.
• Desiderius Erasmus. That guy who was the premier scholar of his age.
• Anne Frank. With the diary.
• Rembrandt Van Rijn. The paintings guy.
• Vincent van Gogh. The other paintings guy.

7/10.

Top 50:

• Christiaan Huygens. Optics dude.
• Freddy Heineken. Beer dude, got kidnapped.
• Baruch de Spinoza. Nature Is God philosopher dude.
• M.C. Escher. Every geek’s favourite graphic artist.
• Queen Beatrix. Or whoever the second last queen was.
• Hendrik Lorentz. The guy whose equations Einstein used.
• Abel Tasman. The guy who discovered Tasmania.

14/20

Top 200:

• Johannes Vermeer. The other other paintings guy.
• Thomas à Kempis. The mediaeval theologian guy.
• Willem III of Orange. The Glorious Revolution guy. Mr Queen Anne.
• Piet Mondriaan. The painter guy with all the squares.
• Paul Verhoeven. Showgirls. Enough said. (19/100)
• John de Mol. Isn’t he the guy who invented Reality TV? *Checks* Yeah. Screw that guy.
• Bernard Haitink. Conductor guy.
• Koning Lodewijk Napoleon. Oh, that’s cute. Calling him by a Dutch name doesn’t make him any less a rent-a-king Napoleon dropped off out of his family progeny.
• Pieter Brueghel. That painter dude with the bleak landscapes, that Pat Nixon namechecks in Nixon in China.
• Louis Andriessen. Hey, I remember him, he’s the dissonant minimalism guy with a bug up his ass about the Canon. I liked De Staat, actually.

24/200, but I’m sure a couple of those are technicalities.

I tied with Peter Flom, which surprises me.

Missing from the list:

• Edsger W. Dijkstra. Goto shall forever more be considered harmful.
• Dirk Christiaan Hesseling. Pioneer of Greek linguistics and creole linguistics.
• Yolanda Hadid. For being less nuts than the other women on Real Housewives of Beverley Hills. Not a high bar, I acknowledge.

That was awesome fun, Jordan. Let’s do it again some time!

Another cultural Orthodox here. I too was allowed beer with lemonade or watered down wine as a kid. I was also told I couldn’t be a sinner as a kid, because I didn’t have the capacity of mature judgement yet. (The legal system acts in a similar way.)

I presume your parents are just using sin to discourage you without having to explain themselves. Greeks in their position might say krima “shame”, maybe even krima apo to Theo “shame according to God”. But I’d be surprised if they used the term amartia “sin”.

Thank you very much, OP, for providing the link.

This is in fact the same letter as that other one you provided, Can modern day Greeks understand and read ancient scriptures in ancient ruins (Like this one?)

Since you’ve provided a clean transcription I don’t have to squint at, happy to do it:

King Antiochus to Menedemus, Greetings.

We want to increase the honours of our sister Queen Laodice even more, and we consider this most necessary, not only so we can live with her caringly and like a guardian, but also because we want to act piously towards sacred things. And we are taking care to do what we should do and what it is right to do, to meet her needs, with family-like love. And we have decided, just as head priests commemorating us have been set up during our reign, that head priestesses commemorating her should be set up in the same places, who will wear golden crowns bearing her image; and they will be enrolled in the covenants, along with the head priests of our ancestors and our current head priests. So since Laodice was brought up in the places under your rule, let everything written above be carried out, and let copies of the letters be written on columns and set up in the most conspicuous places, so that now and forever our favour to our sister should be made clear through these.

119th year of the Seleucids, month of Xanthicus.

I did Engineering as an undergrad. So I should have a good appreciation of statistics, and work through the odds, right?

Screw that. I played a slot machine once when I was 16, lost all the money I put in after being ahead, and I’m not doing that shit again. I refuse to set foot on my own into the Melbourne Casino (although sometimes I have no choice, such as my cousin’s wedding reception, or my wife buying tickets to see *sigh* Richard Marx).

Besides, Melbourne Uni’s teaching of Engineering is crap, and the way they teach maths to engineers is even worse. You can taste the contempt from the lecturers. Anything I learned in probability and statistics went in one ear and out the other.

So I’ll take the 1K. Every. Fricking. Time.

Which, of course, is why I am not loaded.

Other answers have addressed why there are anti-Islamic parties in Australia.

Why are there several anti-Islamic parties in Australia?

Splinterism, an endemic issue with extremist parties, and movements in general preoccupied with ideological purity rather than electoral success through coalition politics. Communism is even more notorious for splinterism, after all.

Latest instance I can think of: the United Patriots Front has splintered from Reclaim Australia, because Reclaim Australia wasn’t monomaniacally anti-Islamic enough.

But if we go through AIJAC’s list, we see another reason: anti-Islamism is not a defining characteristic of many of the parties listed there; it’s just a common attribute of populist right/far right groupings.

• Pauline Hanson’s One Nation: anti-immigrant, rightwing populist. (East Asians were her bugbear twenty years ago.)
• Australia First Party: neo-nazi.
• Rise Up Australia Party: Christianist. I can’t imagine a Sri Lankan heading up the United Patriots Front, after all.
• Citizens Electoral Council: LaRouche-ist. How the hell I ended up on their mailing list is a mystery to me.