Category: Uncategorized

Read less Lynn Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves) and more David Crystal (Making a Point)!

(That was a genius move of Profile Books, btw: to publish both the Punctuation Panic book, and its Refutation.)

As Crystal argues compellingly, Internet and SMS discourse don’t make people forget the rules of formal punctuation they have been taught in school (sometimes, successfully). As Zeibura S. Kathau puts it (What does your English accent sound like?): “I can speak Job Interview too.”

But it does allow them to ignore those rules in certain registers, which are more relaxed about the rules of formal grammar, and where you need not punctuate in Job Interview. That does not mean there are no rules at all in that register; ending an exchange with a period in an text means something distinct, in a register where the default is to leave it out. Not to mention the use of periods to represent. emphatic. speech. like. this.

And if you can command two registers of grammar and punctuation, rather than one, why, surely you’re better off.

Now, Quora tends to the formal rather than the informal side of punctuation: Wikipedia rather than Twitter. And yes, some contributors are slack about it, because they treat Quora as an extension of their Twitter or texting register. We speak a toned down version of Job Interview here, and some don’t tweak to that immediately. That does not necessarily mean those posters can’t speak Job Interview.

As you found out in comments, OP, the history came along for the ride with the literature: Thucydides and Caesar were read more as literature, than because schools actually cared what happened in Syracuse in 415 BC. But they are great literature.

Why were the Classics valued in elite schools in 19th century England?

Well, I can argue the intrinsic merit of the Classics, but I won’t. Instead, I will pick up on your response to Andrew Munro, and I’ll do a historical justification.

In the Renaissance, when Roman and Greek literature were rediscovered, that literature was treated as the source and reference point of all culture. To know that literature was to be cultured. There was literature already happening in the vernacular languages; but in the 16th century, at the time of Shakespeare, noone was studying Shakespeare as the repository of art and emotion and example and challenge that it is now. All there was was the Classics, and the Bible.

And the point of a liberal arts education back then, as it was in Ancient Greece, was not to get you a job. You didn’t go to uni for that; you went out as an apprentice, and people looked down on you as a mechanical. The point of a liberal arts education was to be cultured. To appreciate good literature. To form good judgement. To have good character.

Which of course presupposed that you were rich, and you were getting yourself an education for fun. Absolutely.

That’s also why people were doing science, btw. For fun. Not because the government funded them to; if the scientists weren’t already loaded, they got themselves a patron who was. And they were not goddamn engineers. Engineers were the people who attached themselves as apprentices.

And everyone doing science or literature read Latin, because that’s what intellectuals wrote in. And because they now had access to the classics, they would try to speak it more like the Romans did, and less like the mediaeval clerks did. Doing science and reading Cicero were part of the same package. It was all part of being cultured.

In the 16th and 17th and 18th century, the English developed their own literature. Gradually more and more science was written outside of Latin. So you didn’t need just Latin to appreciate good literature or do science. But the public school system stuck with it, because their ancestors did, and because Classical literature was still felt to be awesome, and because old habits died hard. And because you didn’t get a public school education to get a job. You got one to be cultured. Besides, any job you were likely to get as an aristocrat would be tied up with being cultured anyway.

Things have changed. Riff-raff like you, OP, and me, and the now rather peeved Michael Masiello (whose rejoinder I hereby solicit), get to go to high school and university. And we need to keep getting a job in mind, because we are riff-raff and not cashed up members of the aristocracy. And the Classics are only one option among many, and hardly the most prestigious one even among the liberal arts.

Plus, the attraction of learning the original languages has gone away. A lot of Classics PhDs I met in the States were somewhat shaky in the Ancient Greek (but a lot better in their Foucault) There was a lot of Latin being used in the 18th century; now it’s a curio. It’s even more marginal for Ancient Greek; it always was.

But there’s still some great literature there. And it’s still literature that pervades how the West thinks of itself.

Now, cynically, the insistence on learning Classics in the original in public schools in the 19th century was an elitist thing, to mark you off from the riff-raff. It didn’t necessarily mean you grokked those speeches by Demosthenes and those dramas by Euripides. And yet, the speech-makers of Britain learned a lot from Demosthenes. Those that were paying attention in the public schools did put that learning to use.

Ultimately, why would you, OP, value knowing Shakespeare? At best, because it is beautiful, and because it teaches you about life. (And movies.) At worst, because everyone else had to suffer through it at school, and you got to suffer through it too. Or, even worse, so you can be a snob, and lord it over the unlettered chavs.

Well, same back then with the Classics, I’d say.

That would be the standard modern Greek relativiser I did my PhD on, in fact.

Add Hebrew ašer > še, Bulgarian deto.

Anon (you didn’t need to Anon this time, Anon), I can rule out Albanian: që in standard Albanian, çë in Arvanitika are not locative.

Mid-2012.

I need to put some text content here. So I’ll say what people said when Derryn Hinch, way too prominent Australian reporter, shaved off his beard.

The image everyone conjured was that of Daffy Duck, sans bill:

Oh, and I don’t deserve to be on the same thread as Michaelis Maus. But there you go.

What Billy Kerr said. To elaborate: the <Otón> transcription is a phonetic transcription from French. The <Óthōn> transcription is the longstanding traditional hellenisation of Otto; it was used inter alia for King Otto of Greece. It incorporates the –th– of the old spelling Otho; and it ends in –ōn, which makes it declinable. (In Demotic, it switches to 1st declension, and becomes <Óthōnas>.)

So the distinction between <Othōn> and <Oton> is like the distinction between, say, Christopher Columbus and Cristoforo Colombo.

I’ll add that the original Ottos that Byzantines encountered were spelled in a number of ways, including Othōn, Ōthōn, but also Ōttos, Óton, and Ónto.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but short of Laura Hale cranking up her dataset, that’s what you’re going to get.

Of the almost 200 people I follow, I have followed a handful for their questions rather than their answers. But most of them have been prodigious questioners, which makes them noteworthy. A couple of them, the questions were either quite good, or genuinely insane (and thus still noteworthy).

Revelation is notorious for its grammatical errors; google Revelation and Solecism (fancy Greek for “bad grammar”) or Barbarism (fancy Greek for “L2 Greek”). You’ll see lots of attempts at explaining it, from the straightforward “he barely spoke Greek” to “he was cutting and pasting bits of the Septuagint without adjusting the grammar” to “there’s a deeper theological reason for it”.

Someone recently did a PhD on it, which seems to get a bit too theological for even theologians, as seen in this review of Morphological and Syntactical Irregularities in the Book of Revelation.

Flattered you’ve A2A’d me, Habib. You’ve A2A’d some good people.

I program; I don’t program well or often, and I mostly program in antiquated languages (I maintained C code from 1985 for a decade, and Perl is my default language), but I program, sometimes even for my day job—my CTO has forced me to pick up Ruby and Golang. Miguel Paraz has been bemused that I don’t post about that, and gratified that I’ve started to (very little). I’m slowly getting back into NLP, and I may end up using the resources here for that.

The techo Quora is rather different to the humanities Quora, btw. The style’s more wooden. 🙂

School sector IT policy, and educational IT standards. By a strange set of happenstances, they’re my day job, and I’ve actually gotten reasonably knowledgeable about them over the past five or six years. It’s fairly niche stuff, so I haven’t had much excuse to talk about them here—although I’ve managed to talk shop with Scott Welch about them.

Artificial languages, including Esperanto, Lojban, and Klingon. They’ve taken up a huge chunk of my youth, and my online fame; and speakers of all three are on here. But they haven’t generated the traffic for me to get into them often.

I do talk a whole lot about topics I am not knowledgeable about, to compensate. I know how to use Wikipedia constructively…

Greek: 1000 years ago, the language was already Early Modern Greek. Unfortunately, we have very very very few records of the vernacular to sift from, out of the archaic Greek everyone was writing.

• We have the Bulgarian Greek inscriptions from 1200 years ago, but by 1000 years ago, the Bulgars were using Slavonic.
• We have vernacular phrases being quoted hither and thither from 900 years ago.
• We have vernacular texts that we kinda sorta date from 900 years ago, but their language is probably closer to what the scribes wrote in the copies we have, which is nearer to 700 years ago.

So pinning down the vernacular from 1000 years ago is tricky.

The closest I’ll mention here is this snippet of a song about Alexios I Komnenos escaping a conspiracy from 1031, recorded (with much embarrassment about the vulgarity of the language) by his daughter Anna Comnena in her Alexiad:

Το Σάββατον της Τυρινής
χαρής, Αλέξη, εννόησές το
και την Δευτέραν το πρωί
ύπα καλώς, γεράκιν μου.

On Cheesefare Saturday
rejoice, Alexi, you worked it out.
And on Monday morning
fly well, my hawk.

In Contemporary Greek that would be:

Το Σάββατο της Τυρινής
να χαρείς, Αλέξη, το κατάλαβες
και τη Δευτέρα το πρωί
πήγαινε καλά, γεράκι μου.

Quite close; and for all that I changed two words, the first word (εννόησές) could still be used. The second word (υπάγω > ύπα) is still used, but its conjugation has changed, so people wouldn’t understand it.

The only phoneme to have changed since was υ (and οι), switching from /y/ to /i/. (So ύπα for “go!” was /ypa/.) In fact, we have a poem from 1030, making fun of a hillbilly priest pronouncing upsilon as /i/: so the modern pronunciation was already around at the time of the song snippet.

The only substantive difference, really, is all the final n’s being dropped. My guess: Modern Greek speakers would be reminded of Cypriot, which is phonologically conservative. (It also keeps double consonants; I have no idea when they disappeared from the rest of Greek, but I suspect it was later.)

Oh, that song snippet? Anna Comnena was not going to leave it alone in such vulgar garb. She appends a translation into something more decent:

κατὰ μὲν τὸ Τυρώνυμον Σάββατον ὑπέρευγέ σοι τῆς ἀγχινοίας, Ἀλέξιε, τὴν δὲ μετὰ τὴν Κυριακὴν Δευτέραν ἡμέραν καθάπέρ τις ὑψιπέτης ἱέραξ ἀφίπτασο τῶν ἐπιβουλευόντων βαρβάρων.

On the Saturday with the name of cheese, much commendation for your sagacity, Alexius. And on the day of Monday after the Sunday, just like some high-flying hawk, you have flown away from the barbarians who meant you harm.

There’s the generic answer: the fine old Greek saying, Η μισή ντροπή δική σου, η άλλη μισή δική τους. “Half the embarrassment is yours, the other half is theirs.”

Yes. They will think you sound ridiculous, no fear of that. They will also be hugely impressed (especially if they’re in the Greek diaspora), and will encourage your efforts. Dive in. And quote that proverb to them. Give ’em sass. They will love it.

Martin Pickering, back me up?

There are specific answers; see e.g. Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer to I’m learning Greek. What is the best way to improve my speaking/grammar skills?