Category: Uncategorized

Two people to date. Arguable in both cases.

The first has an obsession on answering any question about the Roman Empire by taking it to include Byzantium. “How did the Roman Empire fall in 476?” “IT DIDN’T!!!!”

One particular post of his, I commented that his argument was casuistry. And, yes, I teased him for his obsession. It escalated rather quickly (10 minutes, 2 or 3 back and forths), he told me to fuck off and stop trolling him, and next thing you know, “Your comment cannot be posted at this time.”

Yeah, that was more my bad. I was right to challenge him, but should have gone straight afterwards to posting my own answer (which I did). And I was wrong to tease him.

The second posted an answer to a question on common law relationships. The answer was narrowly US-focussed, the question was implicitly US-focussed, and I commented something like “that’s a US-specific answer to a US-specific question”. (And then added two sentences about how common law relationships are legally accepted in Australia.)

“Your comment cannot be posted at this time.”

That, I think, was more his bad than mine.

I am the first to say that Quora Inc are technically incompenent (in places; I was rather impressed with their recent post on CSS: Faster Paint Times by Michael Yong on Engineering at Quora).

But concretely, look more closely at the all time graph.

See how it starts back at 2013 or whenever? (I’m not checking, coz it’s slow.)

What’s the bet that the all time graph doesn’t start fetching data to plot from when you joined Quora, but from the start of time?

Oh, and 1.6 million views is modest, is it?

I’ve got 300k.

I hate you.

(Checks profile)

Oh, you’re that anti-anti-smoking dude! In that case, I love you. Coz God knows, you’re not getting a whole lot of love on this forum…

The archaicness of -trix is indeed very very relevant to the topic.

I agree with Jason Whyte’s answer, I’ll just elaborate on it.

In the past of English, gendering was overt, and feminine actor suffixes were quite marked. –er was masculine and had a –ress counterpart; –or was masculine and had a –trix counterpart; –man was masculine and had a –woman counterpart (kinda).

When English ideologically moved away from gendering of roles, –trix was pretty marginal already, so people just forgot it was ever there: dominator/dominatrix is the only instance where -trix is alive and well. –ress is far from dead, but English is pretty ungendered much of the time, and it was easy for –er to generalise from masculine to generic. Not all the time: the US prefers she’s a server to she’s a waiter—but note, it’s still serv-er. The masculine connotation of -er was weak enough, and -er was generic enough already in meaning, that it could be ignored.

But –man? Well, it’s identical to man.

At this point, you could retort that –man in Old English meant “human being” (“man” was were), and people should have accepted that –man was generic. Well, they could have, but they didn’t. People interpret the meaning of morphemes in a synchronic paradigm (what other words and suffixes do I know right now, not historically). The synchronic identity of –man and man has been too compelling for people, and (this is also crucial) the use of –man as a suffix infrequent enough that it was never as generic as –er.

Several culture-specific factors, as others have pointed out: scarcity, attitudes towards ethnic minorities, constructs of beauty, yadda yadda.

I conducted the extremely scientific experiment of searching mavromata “brown-eyed girl” and galanomata “blue-eyed girl” on the Greek lyrics site stixoi.info. Brown-eyed win 87 to 20—despite blue-eyed Greeks being rather rare. And there is a definite cultural construct of brown-eyed girls in Greek song: that of the penetrating glance.

And yet, there’s that lovely poem by Dimitris Lipertis in Cypriot dialect: “Hey, blue-eyes, hark! They’re knocking!/ Oh mother, it’s just the pig.” (about a girl trying to cover up her nighttime tryst).

… OK, it sounds better in Cypriot.

The question is somewhat opaque, but OP is getting to the question of, why is the definition of a word such a complex, and potentially circular, graph of links to other definitions. Your original question, OP, was in fact about circularity.

The answer is:

• Dictionary definitions aren’t particularly concerned about rigour or non-circularity: you’re assumed as a language learner to already have a baseline understanding of the definitional human language, which you can use to bootstrap any other definitions.
• Attempts at a rigorous semantics of definitions will inevitably have to bottom out on a list of Semantic primes, a set of concepts that have to be taken as givens rather than defined themselves.
• Identifying that list of primes, and using them for definitions, has not been a popular pastime. It’s work. Natural semantic metalanguage is an admirable initiative in that direction.
• Unfortunately, NSM also wanted to use those primes in human-intelligible definitions. That makes things dirtier. The initial Spartan beauty of Anna Wierzbicka’s Lingua Mentalis had 14 primes; now it’s in the 60s.
• Definitions of words in NSM are a valuable discipline to get into: they really force you to break concepts down. They are also a hilariously forced subset of English.

Look into Wierzbicka’s work, OP. Even if you don’t like the approach, it’s got some excellent insights. And start with the early stuff, including Lingua Mentalis itself.

How many months ago did you A2A me this, Zeibura S. Kathau? I’ve been clearing out my backlog.

The question really is not why isn’t there a Single Modern Latin, but why is there a Single Modern Greek.

1. Actually, there is not a single Modern Hellenic language. Under no linguistically informed notion of language is Tsakonian or Southern Cappadocian the same language as Standard Athenian Greek. You have to be damned generous to say Pontic is. And if we’re being honest, basilectal Cypriot is pretty iffy too. But it is still fair to say that there is less diversity within the Hellenic languages than there is within the Romance languages.
2. The area over which Modern Romance languages were spoken historically is much bigger than the area over which Modern Hellenic languages were. Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Romania, patches of the Balkans; vs. Greece, Cyprus, and patches of the Anatolian hinterland [EDIT: and some other bits: see Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s comment]. Greece may have been the Eastern Roman Empire’s lingua franca, but that didn’t hellenise the Slavs or the Syrians.

A rough guess at 800 AD dominion of Romance and Hellenic languages.

1. There are lots of substrates at work in Romance, both Celtic and Germanic (and whatever the hell the substrate of Romanian is). That’s a large part of what has differentiated the Romance languages. Now, Greece has had its share of other peoples moving in too, and there’s a lot of adstratal effects on Greek: Greek is a part of the Balkan Sprachbund, especially on the Balkan mainland, and there have been clear contact effects—not all one way. But even though there were clearly substantial hellenised Slavic populations in the middle ages, Greek does not come across as a language with a whole lot of substrate going on.
1. Tsakonian does; but Hesseling was pilloried for suggesting it. By town council meeting, no less.
2. If an Egyptian Greek had survived, you’d be seeing a lot more substrate effects. They’re certainly quite clear in the papyri.
2. The prestige of archaic Greek (particularly church Greek; much later on, written Greek in general) had a profoundly conservative effect on the language, in a way that was different to Western Europe. In fact, the Greek Aromanian linguist Nikos Katsanis has pointed out that the most extreme palatalisations that have happened in Greece were in Tsakonian and Aromanian. Both were so far removed from the language of the Church, that the language of the Church could not have any effect on their pronunciation.
1. He left out Lesbos, where there’s been similar hi-jinx. But it’s a nice observation.

People loathe the pissing contest between Hitler and Stalin that always arises with these questions, but it’s curiously absent from this thread. So:

Stalin.

Because with Hitler, at least you knew who the enemies were throughout his reign. With Stalin, the enemies changed depending on what side of bed he got up on. If both are evil, I’ll fear evil + unpredictable more than evil + predictable.

No. Australia.

1. McKayla Kennedy is awesome and considered and thoughtful, and I don’t like surfacing disagreements with her, particularly when my response is impulsive and emotive and rash.
2. There are legitimate uses of anonymity even in seemingly innocuous topics. A very cluey poster on Turkic languages goes anon, because he doesn’t want the grief from Turkish nationalists, for example. It is a sliding scale of risk.
3. But, in topics and contexts where a Reasonable Person would not see the point of anonymity, and in a Quora where, as Laura Hale diagnosed, there’s between 30 and 50% of all questions being asked anonymously—

—yes, I do think it says something. It says that people don’t want their eponymous identity associated with what they post online, not because it’s particularly risky, but because that’s their intrinsic sense of privacy. It’s the people who don’t want to submit to the Real Name policy, and use anonymity instead of the now unavailable pseudonymity.

If you’re not judgemental, it still says about them that they don’t want to be publicly accountable for their contributions to Quora. If you’re judgemental like me, it says that they are not part of my tribe: they are not people who engage on the site in the same way I do.

McKayla, you posted a hierarchy of Quora users: McKayla Kennedy’s answer to How is Quora stratified below the Top Writer level? I’m delighted to quote you:

Anonymouses—frankly, they don’t rank on the scale at all because none of their answers are connectable. They are like ghosts, some good spirits and some bad, but necessary nonetheless. Collectively, they are viewed with vague distrust.

In fact, you remind me of the Greek fairy tale depictions of fairies or Africans: sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent, but always alien.

There’s a couple of lists out there of ASCII approximations of Unicode punctuation, including:

• Lexical Tools
• https://lexsrv3.nlm.nih.gov/LexS…
• Replacing unicode punctuation with ASCII approximations

None of them include (C) and (R), irritatingly.

If you want ASCII approximations of other scripts, you’re getting into ASCII Romanisations, such as Greeklish, Fingilish, 3arabizi, etc.; see Category:Romanization by script