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Peter J. Wright is correct that it is [dɪsˈeinia], but doesn’t explain why. And I knew he was right, but I also confirmed that the first -a- in the Greek word ἀνία is short. So is the first -a- in the Greek μανία. So why is it a long a?

Traditional English pronunciation of Latin is why.

It’s a good read. It explains what streamlining was going through the heads of the people importing words from Greek and Latin into English. And why mania has a long a. (It’s because it was pronounced as ma-nya, making the stressed ma– the second last syllable—which is always long when open.)

And now, I want to decapitate an English teacher.

I am 45. I have a PhD in the humanities. I am a semi-Classicist. I have never seen these rules before. WHY WAS I NEVER TAUGHT THESE RULES IN MY SCHOOLING?!

Yes, we intuit the rules by analogy; that’s how we know how to pronounce written words in English in general. But given all the detritus thrown at me during my schooling, why, WHY, WHY was this two page guide never brought to my attention before?!

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It’s a funny coinage, btw, dysania; the kind of inkwell word that noone actually uses in anger, and somehow ends up in some medical dictionary: Dysania. Ania is Homeric Greek for grief, anxiety; if you squint, and pay more attention to the adjective aniaros than the noun ania, maybe tedium. Ennui even.

Phobia of getting out of bed is a real thing if you’re depressed. (Shut up with your “hyuck hyuck, we just call it Mondays, hyuck hyuck.”) But dysania is a strange way of expressing it. Bad tedium? Bad grief? That’s all of depression.

And don’t get me started on dysania’s synonym, clinomania. No, people who are too depressed to get out of bed do not have an obsession with lying down.

Refer: What do you look like when you speak Ancient Greek (Koine) in Greece today?

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).

Up until the late Middle Ages, English spelling (at least, as we reconstruct it) is not that bad. It is internally consistent, and, importantly, it varies from region to region, because they actually spoke different dialects from region to region. Yeah, the mute final <e> was an annoying way to indicate that a vowel was long, but you’re not left completely in outer space.

A sequence of bad things happened at around the same time in the 1500s.

Printing was invented, which motivated standardising spelling. And freezing it in time. Not as frozen as we now think, there was still plenty of variability, but the 1500s is the last time English spelling makes sense.

Unfortunately, the 1500s was a bad time to be fixing the spelling of English. It was halfway through the Great English Vowel Shift. It was at the start of a bunch of other sound changes, some of which were pretty radical. What happened to <gh> was nuts, which is why the pronunciation of <gh> now makes no sense.

(That <gh> was a /x/, like the <j> in Spanish. So throughout used to be pronounced /θɹuːxuːt/. Seriously.)

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the learnèd folk of the English language rediscovered Latin and Greek. So they started attempting to spell words in a fashion more appropriate to their Latin and Greek roots. And occasionally, even getting it right.

Sounds kept changing; English spelling didn’t. They changed pretty recently. Cue Samuel Johnson:

I remember an instance: when I published the Plan for my Dictionary, Lord Chesterfield told me that the word great should be pronounced so as to rhyme to state; and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it should be pronounced so as to rhyme to seat, and that none but an Irishman would pronounce it grait. Now here were two men of the highest rank, the one, the best speaker in the House of Lords, the other, the best speaker in the House of Commons, differing entirely.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, won—which, I guess, makes Irishmen of us all. (That’s why Reagan is pronounced Raygun. And why the Irish have a cup of tay.)

But we didn’t change the spelling of great to match; we still spell it as if it rhymes with seat.

Why no spelling reform in English, then? Well, as English-language spelling reform says, it could have been even worse. There was some 17th century reform: we don’t use warre or sinne or toune any more. Webster did, well, some things in the US. But really, the opportunity was lost in the 16th century, and we do lack the kind of centralised control that made centralised spelling reform possible elsewhere.

My time for struggling with that question, like so many others’, was high school.

I did not have Augustine to debate with, as Michael Masiello did. But it was pretty painful.

I looked over the poems I wrote at the time, to see if I had an answer at the ready back then. To my surprise, I think I did. I’ll append the Esperanto original in comments.

You, who guard the souls turned to shades,
treat them well.
They’ve lived through hell, they’ve missed beatitude;
let them at least find
some kind of rest with you, who
guard the souls turned to shades.

In your night-black cloudless reign,
let some light through now and then,
that the souls turned to shades may move more lightly,
even if, despite it all, still
with no hope, while hope is missing in your
night-black cloudless reign.

You will smash our life’s work to dust, you have had final victory,
you are rotting away all beauty.
Be contented and be compassionate, Great Source of Fear,
for already you are no longer feared
by those you guard, having smashed
their life’s work to dust, having had final victory.

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…