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I don’t know that you’ll find many cultures that think getting blotto is a wonderful thing, but Greek traditional culture is one of many that tut-tuts public drunkenness. The maxim my father used to warn me with was, να το πίνεις [το κρασί], να μη σε πίνει: “You should drink it [wine], you shouldn’t let it drink you.”

(“In Soviet Russia” joke opportunities ignored.)

Greek drinking culture is accompanied by nibbles (mezze), expressly so as to avert quick inebriation—especially if brandy (ouzo, raki) rather than wine is involved. Wine, for that matter, features at the dinner table rather than in the mezze joint. There is a word for drinking without nibbles: xerosfyri, “dry hammer”; the etymology may in fact be “dry + whistling” or a corruption of “dry + sieved”. There is a word for it, precisely because it is looked down upon. Indeed, British drinking culture, with its drinking xerosfyri, was an easy target of criticism for my aunts and uncles in Greece. (Their children of course were already going to bars and knocking back whisky anyway.)

Accompanying this, Greek slang has about as many words for being drunk as Eskimo is alleged to have for snow: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some slang phrases to describe getting drunk in your language or country?

Pi approximation day?

By almost remembering it. Just two days off…

It’s only correct that Orthodoxy kept the Greek alphabet alive; scripts in the Ottoman Empire were associated with creed. Thus, according to the creed of the Greek speaker, Greek was written in

• Greek script (Orthodox),
• Latin script (Catholic: the Franco-Levantines, including many works of the Cretan Renaissance, and in the Aegean sponsored by Jesuit schools),
• Hebrew (Jews: the Judaeo-Greek Pentateuch of 1547, and some other songs and religious texts in Judaeo-Greek), and
• Arabic (Aljamiado literature, written by and for Muslim Greeks).

Just as Turkish was written in Greek script for Turkish-speaking Christians (Karamanlides). There would be no Aljamiado literature, of course, if Greek Muslims didn’t want to write and read in Greek.

Aljamiado literature (a term borrowed from its Spanish counterpart) has been ignored by Greek scholars until recently. A 2014 lecture on the literature is available at Τουρκογιαννιώτικα στιχοπλάκια και τουρκοκρητικές μαντινάδες: Η ελληνική aljamiado γραμματεία (inaudible Turkish and Greek, with audible but halting simultaneous translation into English).

EDIT: Btw, the notion you will occasionally hear in Greece, that the Greek church somehow preserved Greek is actually bundled up in the notion that the Greek church preserved Greek identity and Greek learning during Ottoman Rule. The Rum Millet, you can argue, did in fact do so; but that was not a Greek idea, but Mehmed II’s. (Dimitris Almyrantis, I’m fishing for an answer from you here.)

A question also posed at Is there a word for answering a question with a question?, over at Stack Exchange.

Maieutics and the Socratic method are not it. That’s Socrates’ use of questions to encourage someone to rethink their premises; Socrates wasn’t ELIZA.

The answer with a long list of rhetorical figures, posed in the form of a bunch of questions, is inaccurate too: those rhetorical figures cited are just questions, as you can check at https://rhetfig.appspot.com/list.

The only reputable-looking answer is counterquestion, which is on Wiktionary (counterquestion – Wiktionary), and in the OED, dating from 1864:

Between them, Christopher Ray Miller’s answer and Brian Collins’ answer have most of it covered. There’s one more way to look at it though.

French dropped /s/ at the start of consonant clusters, at the start and in the middle of words. So /sp/ > /p/, /sn/ > /n/, /st/ > /t/ etc: hospital > hôpital, Rhodanus > *Rhodne > *Rhosne > Rhône, establir > établir.

The motivation for this in phonotactics is to reduce the complexity of syllable structures, which make syllables easier to pronounce. It is linguistically common for /s/ to drop off at the start of clusters like that. Dennis Rhodes’ answer notices a similar process going on in some dialects of Spanish (Cuba, Puerto Rico): español ends up pronounced as etpañol, which is on the way to epañol. In my favourite language, Tsakonian, /s/ followed by a consonant is replaced by the aspirated consonant: stoma > tʰuma, sporos > pʰore.

You’ve got a variety of responses here.

If Obvious Troll Is Trolling, your answer is not going to educate them, the question is likely going to be deleted anyway, and your answer will become inaccessible unless you archive it off to a blog. As many have said, Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer most succinctly.

If you write a good answer anyway, i.e. answer it appropriately: don’t do it for the OP, as Tong Hui Kang’s answer argues. Do it to spread good information. And do it if you think it is really important to spread that information, because the risk that the question is going to be deleted anyway is pretty strong.

Don’t do it to give a withering witty reply back. Not unless it’s Oscar Wilde God Level funny. Countersnark gets boring quickly.

Don’t do it to virtue signal. I don’t care if the term has been appropriated by the Cultural Right, it points to a real phenomenon, there’s way too much of it on Quora, and it is boring. And not particularly informative.

Don’t do it to flame them right back to oblivion. The way BNBR works, you’ll be the one ending up in oblivion.

And lastly and most difficult of all: Do not assume by default that everyone who disagrees with your worldview is an Obvious Troll Trolling. Stating that assumption in an answer is, in fact, a BNBR offence. (I’m sure Jennifer Edeburn has the reference for that somewhere.) Hanlon’s razor applies to Quora questions, just as it does to Quora UX.

Articulatory phonetics was indeed done before Palatography. And not just by the Ottomans: the Korean script Hangul originated in articulatory phonetics, and for that matter both the Sanskrit grammarians and the later Graeco-Roman grammarians had pretty much had it figured out.

And they could just as my students in first year were able to learn phonetics from me, by watching my mouth and thinking about their tongue positioning. Yes, we used diagrams like that too, but people do know what the roof of their mouth is, or their hard palate, or that bumpy thing just behind their teeth; they know when they are rounding their lips, and when their tongue moves to the front or back of their mouth. For the phonemically distinct places and manners of articulation of any language—just half a dozen each—you don’t need any more detail in location than what you can introspect by being aware of what your mouth muscles are doing.

Phonetic detail needs more than that. And phonetic detail is the domain of the palatograph and the spectrogram.

Maybe Protagoras’ “Man is the measure of all things” (πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἄνθρωπος)?

He also is believed to have created a major controversy during ancient times through his statement that, “Man is the measure of all things”, interpreted by Plato to mean that there is no absolute truth, but that which individuals deem to be the truth. Although there is reason to question the extent of the interpretation of his arguments that has followed, that concept of individual relativity was revolutionary for the time, and contrasted with other philosophical doctrines that claimed the universe was based on something objective, outside of human influence or perceptions.

This isn’t the answer, and I hope it will trigger an answer from the more knowledgeable.

Notions of human-crafted art as an expression of the sublime are not particularly new. But in the 19th century, art inspired not merely “almost” religious reactions; it actually came to occupy the place of a surrogate religion. This was dispelled with World War I, and the various forms of art retreated from the Sublime in different ways. The visual arts did it with dadaism, and they’re still going on about it to this day.

I got the fullest articulation of this from looking over the shoulder of someone doing his PhD on the Italian philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter; you can see a reflection of this in the Wikipedia page, where Man overpowers malign Nature through capital-R Rhetoric. Poor naive bastard, I thought. Just as well he killed himself before WWI.

Wagner was the most full-throated expression of this notion of a surrogate religion. He was a prolific writer despite being a composer; he architected his operas as Total works of art, combining the visual, the musical, and the literary; he ladled mysticism heavily both in the librettos and the staging of the operas; and he had a lot of loyal acolytes.

Why would Wagner think that up? There was a change in how music was produced, from court entertainment to subscriptions and paying customers. There was a change in how the artist was regarded, from decorator to conduit of the sublime to expressor of emotions. Both are wound up in where Romanticism comes from. But the extent to which Wagner took it must have come, in at least some part, from the diminishing of power that religion had over the intelligentsia.

Wagner comes before Nietzsche, but to many Wagnerians, God was already if not dead, sickly: in a rationalist, enlightenment worldview, religion just didn’t hold the same mystique. And since this worldview was still quite recent, the deist and atheist intelligentsia went looking for their recently lost experience of the transcendental elsewhere.

Frisk’s etymological dictionary concurs with Frank Dauenhauer’s answer, that the bustard was called ōtis ‘one with ears’ (“from its cheek tufts or head? See Thompson, Birds”); thus also ōtos ‘scops owl’, from its ear tufts.

If you go to A glossary of Greek birds : Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 1860-1948 Sir, p. 200, you’ll find he says the etymology is doubtful, as well as whether the bird is the Great bustard (Otis tarda) or the Houbara bustard. But I don’t see what else it would be.