Category: Uncategorized

OP, get a hold of Frisk’s and Chantraine’s etymological dictionaries of Ancient Greek. Which may or may not currently be at archive.org—although they are both under copyright, so of course, you should be going to your local university library instead.

Hēlios is simply a reflex of the Indo-European word for Sun, via proto-Greek *sāwélios. See sóh₂wl̥ at Wiktionary. Since Indo-European already had a word for Sun, the etymology of Zeus as a sky god is irrelevant: the bright sun is not the same as the bright sky.

Well, Chad Turner, Frisk and Chantraine are on the internet…

Frisk (Lakōn): Krahe, in Indogermanische Forschungen 57:119, relates the name as suspected Illyrian to Lacinium, a promontory in Southern Italy, and Juno Lacinia.

Chantraine (Lakedaimōn): Etymology unknown. There have been unsuccessful attempts to use the gloss in Hesychius “lakedama: bitter water made in the sea [poured out in salt flats] which the peasants of Macedonia drink”. […] Szereményi, Glotta 38 (1960): 14–17 invokes the Mycenaean anthroponym Rakedano, dative Rakedanore, which he reads as Lakedanōr “Laked-man”, which would yield the same first part of the compound Laken-daimōn: ingenious, but still dubious. One can also interpret Lakedaimōn as an indigenous prehellenic term.

See: Edward Conway’s answer to What was the Spartan motto?

Pro ludo aut pro lucro? Pro alterutro laboro; pro utroque malim.

Alberto Yagos?

Other respondents have covered this well (which is a benefit of me putting off replying to A2A’s!)

I’ll just add some metacommentary. People of Quora who get me in their feed because they like me or something: do read the other responses.

• The egalitarian ideal of Australia is that we address each other as mate, because we are not Class-Obsessed Poms [British]. But that’s an ideal, and it has its limits. It’s not really appropriate for someone substantially older than you. Mateship was also was never really a female friendly thing, though that has eroded somewhat.
• There is also something of a class factor to mate. Australians are in denial about there being class in Australia (because, again, We Are Not Poms); but all the grumbling about bogans is nothing if not classist.
• Mate is fine for males younger than you, including teens and kids.
• Darl and love were addressed to women in the bad old days; hence Sarah Boon asking noone keep using them. I have been addressed with darl and love myself by older women, mostly in service industry contexts; but it is decidedly antiquated.
• Zero-address is safe, as others have said, precisely because we’re uncomfortable with more formal alternatives to mate (such as sir—which we wince at even in service industry contexts), and we have a lack of female alternatives. (Mate towards women is limited, probably odd to most people, and certainly only addressed to women you know, not strangers.)
• Ma’am has actually gotten me adverse reactions. I do use it, but as an ironic thing.

To narrow down Cheri Thomas’ answer: failing to scope down your thesis as you go. You are always more ambitious at the start of the thesis than you need to be, and you will need to say less than you thought you would.

Cheri says:

Another is that they set too high a standard for their dissertation topic. The dissertation is something to get over and done with. It’s your first piece as as academic, not your greatest piece.

Now, for all too many, it will be their only piece, unless they’re happy signing up to a lifetime of being a TA and penury. But it’s still true: as a fellow student once said to me, “It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be done.”

Not having a plan and methodology and a strategy (which, inter alia, will help you scope it down when you need to). If your supervisor is doing their job, they will help you have a plan. All too often, they don’t; you may need to draw on your peers for that. A PhD is a three year project. It is your baptism of fire in project management. That is something you will not have learned from undergrad.

Unless you’re one of those horrible ghastly geniuses that can pull off a dissertation in 10 pages, in one of those disciplines where you can get away with it, it’s a mistake to assume that doing a PhD is about being brilliant. It isn’t. Brilliance gets you started. Slog and persistence get you to finish it. The slog is not fun (though the peers are). The motivation is even harder, especially if you’re part time.

Oh, doing a PhD part time? Especially if you have family responsibilities or teaching responsibilities? Feasible, but much, much, much harder. Much more of a requirement that you have disciplined project management about it. Not being brilliant was not a predictor of failing to complete. Not having enough time in the week to focus on the project, I’m afraid, was.

Oh, and if you want an academic job at the end of it, which is a slightly different topic, there are some other fatal errors, which I can certainly attest to:

• Not doing something fashionable
• Not networking
• Not publishing early and often
• Doing too much TA work

Ordelafo Faliero de Doni, 34th Doge of Venice, ruled 1102–1117.

Like the Latin says: Orfaletrus D(e)i Gra(tia) Veneciȩ Dux. Ordelafo, By God’s Grace, Doge of Venice.

Ordelafo is a one-off name, and is presumed to be the Venetian name Faledro, spelled backwards.

Spelling names backwards as far back as the 12th century. And coming up with Ordelafo. That impresses me.

Question patterns by Jay Wacker on The Quora Blog

Question patterns exist. However according to Jay Wacker’s response to Edward Conway in comments there, all such bot-generated questions are posted by a specific bot, so this is not Quora’s doing.

Of course they can:

var’aq – Esolang. A programming language using Klingon vocabulary.

Of course, the pIqaD (see Klingon alphabets) does not have an official Unicode encoding: the ostensive reason is that Klingonists don’t actually use the pIqaD. The gossip is that the German arm of the ISO vetoed it, for fear of bringing Unicode into disrepute. (Then Unicode went and dumped every daft emoji they could find into the codeset; way to pick the wrong target, German arm of ISO.)

That means you would need to use an unofficial mapping into the Unicode Private Use area (ConScript Unicode Registry), if you want your var’aq program to show in pIqaD. But if you’re going to be programming in var’aq, I suggest the unofficialness of the ConScript Unicode Registry is the least of your problems…

People of Australia!

… Yairs?

People of Australia! Oyez, oyez, oyez!

[from: Christine Leigh Langtree’s answer to What city in your country do you feel would give a foreigner the best idea of said country’s culture?]

… Oy! oy! oy! Whaddaya want, Nicko? I’ve got some shrimps goin’ on the barbie!

There’s this guy on Quora, right. An’ ’e arsked a question ’bout two yeeears ago.

… Go on.

And the question was, wait for it…

… Why, one-and-a-half decades into the twenty-first century, do Australians (and many others) still have to physically go to polling booths and fill out voting papers in general and state elections?

… You wot?!

… Why, one-and-a-half decades into the twenty-first century, do Australians (and many others) still have to physically go to polling booths and fill out voting papers in general and state elections?

Ha…

… baha…

haHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Good one, mate! Now come on over an’ ’ave a prawn mate!

An’ bring yer own farking beer this time, ya cheaparse!

---

Why, people of Quora, why would my fellow antipodeans react in September 2016 with such merriment about this question, asked January 2015?

Domhnall O’Huigin, God rest him, had the right answer from Ireland’s experience. But Australia has a rather more salient counterexample for online voting. A rather recent counterexample. A rather annoying counterexample.

A counterexample that has spawned the following questions right here on Quora:

• What do you think of the Census fail In Australia?
• What was the reason for the Australian census breakdown on August 9, 2016?

The 2016 census went online. It was a disaster. A government orchestrated DDOS on its own servers.

And right after the disaster, every pundit known in the continent was chortling to whoever would listen, “well, so much for online voting.”