Category: Uncategorized

Inertia. Census questions are a slow moving beast, and getting them updated is extremely difficult. The question on volunteerism in this year’s census was a request from Peter Costello, three censuses ago. The Australian Bureau of Statistics could not afford to spend the money to get rid of it.

There is plenty of cowboy stuff to blame the ABS for, but if they hadn’t been defunded and rudderless, they wouldn’t have gone cowboy to begin with.

That inertia is in play widely. People noted with dismay the lack of an intersex option on the census. State governments have been more proactive: in the ACT it is in fact mandated to offer intersex as an option in any government survey; and the data standard I help manage in the Australian school sector has been updated to include it.

But the federal bodies in education have not updated their data collection manual yet. And in fact the parenting role question has been a bone of contention between the state and federal bodies in education, for the same reason. Federal bodies are interested in establishing mothers’ role in encouraging education. State bodies have little interest anymore in differentiating fathers from mothers in their data collecting.

So it’s not really that they’ve chosen to exclude, it’s that they haven’t gotten around to updating.

The reason why we in Australia built Canberra in a middle of nowhere sheep paddock was precisely that the two main cities, Melbourne and Sydney, hated each other. NSW and Victoria were quite independent colonies before Federation; and Australia is a federation, as in decentralised state, precisely because of that independence.

(As with other federations, authority has gradually centralised to makes things practical.)

Sydneysiders and Melburnians don’t exactly hate each other, but there is a fair bit of parochialism and contempt on both sides about their respective quirks.

Buses here in Melbourne will proudly boast of TV shows that are shot in Melbourne; you have to pay attention here to notice how much of Australian TV is Sydney. Melbourne prides itself on how intellectual it is by comparison with the superficial Harbour City; how Melbourne is the home of comedy and the best comedy Sydney could come up with was the sitcom Hey Dad!; how we are the Most Liveable City in the world according to whichever survey we’ve bribed this week, etc etc etc. And I have no doubt Sydneysiders have plenty of stuff to come back at us with.

Canberra? We can’t summon up that much passion against it. We mostly just laugh at it. A jumped up country town full of civil servants, with nightlife to match. (Yes, it’s getting better. It started from a very low baseline.)

Frederick Douglass.

I mean, I’m white Australian, and I’m flabbergasted that Hollywood has still not gotten there.

Maybe it’s because I’m white Australian.

Epic Rap Battles of History is… a start, but he deserves a lot more:

Putting this up not because something has happened to trigger it, but because I just came across it again, and I’ve been meaning to pin it here.

What do Quora users think of Quora Product Management?

https://www.quora.com/What-do-Qu…

If they can always get more writers where we came from, and there is no need for Quora Inc to make its writers stakeholders (outside the secret Facebook group), then we are commoditized, and we are just product.

My own impotent response is:

• I will not thank them for it
• I will not help them in it
• I will not show them the respect they don’t show me

My loyalty is to my fellow Quorans. I do not consider Adam DiCaprio my fellow Quoran.

Kat Rectenwald disagreed with my retaliatory ethics, and I respect that. But that’s where I stand.

I don’t know the full answer, and I’m not seeing enough of an answer in Wikipedia. Let me put together what I know.

• There have been Roma in Greece for the better part of a millennium; we know linguistically that they went through Anatolia and Greece on the way to Europe, there is Greek in the Roma core vocabulary (such the work for sky), and there are historical records.
• Romani people: “The descendants of groups, such as Sepečides or Sevljara, Kalpazaja, Filipidži and others, living in Athens, Thessaloniki, central Greece and Aegean Macedonia are mostly Orthodox Christians, with Islamic beliefs held by a minority of the population. Following the Peace Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, many Muslim Roma moved to Turkey in the subsequent population exchange between Turkey and Greece.”
• Muslim Roma: “Greece (a small part of Muslim Roma concentrated in Thrace)”. After the Lausanne Treaty, Thrace is where the Muslims of Greece were exempt from the population exchanges.
• I remember the reprobate Bishop Augustin of Florina organising missionary work to convert Muslim Roma. The Greek Orthodox were chuffed to find someone to convert locally.
• Romany was the basis of cants, secrecy languages used in Greece. Traditionally, they were the cants of builders (which leads to the guess that many builders were Roma). Latterly, kaliarda, the gay cant (and Greek counterpart of Polari) had a substantial Romani basis, with a lot of French and English sprinkled on top. So there was bilingualism with Greek.
• One of the first Romani variants to be studied extensively (in 1981) was that of the Roma living in Agia Varvara, a suburb of Athens. (Ρομά – Βικιπαίδεια at least implies they are the biggest grouping of Roma in Greece.) They were originally from Turkey.
• There are Para-Romani languages throughout Europe: mixed languages spoken by Roma, displaying gradual language shift to the local languages. Romano-Greek language/Hellenoromani exists; a linguistics student found a settlement using it in the vicinity of Salonica. But that’s one settlement. The others speak either Greek, Romani, or Turkish.
• Per Muslim Roma, 40% of Bulgaria’s Roma are Muslim, and per Romani people they are concentrated in the south of the country, where the Bulgarian Turks are.
• Balkan Roma are commonly termed “Turkish Gypsies” (Romani people); this is likely more about them being Ottoman, but most of them are either Muslim or recent converts to Christianity.

So, from this bunch of stuff, I surmise:

• A. Many Roma in Greece came from Turkey, where they spoke Turkish, and they still do. It’s not like the Greek state was always bending over backward to make them feel Greek.
• B. Many Roma in Bulgarian and Greek Thrace are Muslim and live among ethnic Turks, so they speak Turkish for the same reason that group A do.
• C. There have clearly been Greek-speaking Roma (hence the Hellenoromani community and the cants, as well as the pre-Ottoman history of the Roma in Greece). They may well not be the majority of Greek Roma.

Messiah (Handel)

The custom of standing for the “Hallelujah” chorus originates from a belief that, at the London premiere, King George II did so, which would have obliged all to stand. There is no convincing evidence that the king was present, or that he attended any subsequent performance of Messiah; the first reference to the practice of standing appears in a letter dated 1756, three years prior to Handel’s death

Hm. You didn’t ask why the letter looks like that, which I’ll answer anyway:

Italicised й:

й

Wikipedia Ŭ suggests it was formed by analogy with proposed Byelorussian ў. Like someone else said on Wikipedia: [citation needed]

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Now, why <ŭ> and not just <u>? Zeibura, you dawg, you know that I love this kind of question, where I try to work out the answer from first principles. I’m pretty sure Gaston Waringhien has given a proper answer somewhere (after all, him and Kalocsay saw Zamenhof’s proto-Esperanto notes, before the Nazis torched everything). But let’s have some fun.

• In Zamenhof’s circumflexless (“telegraphic”) rendering of Esperanto, circumflexed letters get replaced by a following h: <ĉ> to <ch>. But <ŭ> could be rendered as just <u>. So Zamenhof was not overly concerned about ambiguity (and he normally was, which is why Esperanto is so neurotic about polysemy).
• I cannot come up with an minimal pair for au and aŭ or eu and eŭ. I’ve been racking my brains for an hour. For example, fra-ulo and fraŭlo would be different words; but there is no fra- root.
• Zamenhof had –aŭ as an odds-and-ends part of speech suffix; it dates from proto-Esperanto. The part of speech suffixes are otherwise vowels; so –aŭ in malgr-aŭ, bald-aŭ, apen-aŭ was deliberately intended to be a single syllable, just like bird-o, blank-a, kapt-i, plen-e.
• As presented in Duonvokaloj kaj diftongoj, Zamenhof’s advice to correspondents early on insisted on the phonetic difference between monosyllabic aŭ/eŭ and bisyllabic au/eu (which certainly does occur in Esperanto).

So, why <ŭ>? Theoretically it could have determined a minimal pair, but it certainly wouldn’t have with Zamenhof’s vocabulary, and I doubt it does even more. And Zamenhof wasn’t fussed about the ambiguity in his telegraphic rendering.

No, it was because in Zamenhof’s own mental model of the language, aŭ/eŭ were single syllables, just like aj/ej/oj/uj are. That’s why –aŭ is a part of speech ending. After all, <au> is a single syllable in German, and <αυ, ευ> in Ancient Greek—which is what Zamenhof must have had in mind in his design.

What is Quora’s policy against users who frequently write factually incorrect answers? has an answer by a Quora Insider, and a Quora Trusted Reporter.

Triangulating between these two answers, and the Quora’s answer to How does Quora deal with reports of factually incorrect answers? policy:

• The official consequence of incorrect answers is collapsing the answer.
• Persistent incorrect answers may (at the mods’ discretion) be deemed spam.
• Incorrect answers are not a reason for banning users (in the stated policy); but spam is.
• In Marc Bodnick’s exegesis of the policy, persistent violation of policy results in bans, which makes the spam-connection explicit.

Of course, User (long live the resistance!) is right: it’s a theology. More specifically, the process of banning someone is a Star Chamber, as a result of being a cryptocracy. (See the intriguing Chrys Jordan’s answer to What if Quora were a country?) The spam connection is at the Star Chamber’s discretion to draw.

In fact, Marc’s answer had a pretty funny comment underneath:

Grant Barnes: Thank you. Will Quora say more about its criteria for factual accuracy in regard to questions of science?

https://www.quora.com/What-is-Qu…

Marc Bodnick: Probably not. Jay Wacker – have we said anything publicly about this?

Oops. You’ve lifted the curtain there.

Konstantinos Konstantinides, that Greek proverb’s actually rather more violent in the original: it’s literally “better they take your eye out than your name”. But your response assumed a readership well-informed about the proclivities of individual users, enough to make judgement calls about individual users. If Quora had confidence that we could all do that, and that those judgements would scale, they wouldn’t be modding the place so heavily.

Or at least unleashing bots and outsourced near-bots to do so…

The question about this is always whether it’s a survival or a revival.

The Greeks of Cargèse for example convinced themselves that their main clan (the Stephanopoli) were descendants of the Comneni, and got the paperwork from the King of France to prove it. As a result, almost everyone from the village is now surnamed Stephanopoli de Comnène. (And they didn’t pronounce it /komniˈnos/ either, when they spoke Greek, but /komˈnenos/. Which shows you it wasn’t a survival, it was them reading Comnène out loud.)

From Komnenos, I see that Konstantinos Varzos did the Comnenan geneaologies in 1984 (1500 pp, linked from the article), and found the last descendant of the royal line died in 1719. And even he may have been lying about it.

So, did the surname survive? Sure. Did the family, as a patronymically passed down surname of the erstwhile Byzantine dynasty? Not as obvious.

Probably, but not necessarily. As the astute Joachim Pense put it (answering this question, rather than the OP’s question):

Joachim Pense’s answer to Linguists believe Proto indo European is the root of all those European languages. Does this mean that at one time everyone spoke the same language?

No. Proto-Indo-European is a reconstruction that has a scope of many centuries and a large area. The reconstruction is not able to get to a finer resolution.

In fact, the idea has been put out there (by Trubetzkoy) that Indo-European may not have been a single language at all, but a Sprachbund of languages. The reconstruction assumes that it was a single language, but the reconstruction does that for methodological reasons: it’s not like we actually know.

Even if Indo-European was a single people, languages are not genetically transmitted. There’s a lot of genetic diversity in people who speak Indo-European languages now; there may have been some diversity back then too—especially if Indo-European was always a language that spread from place to place, whether culturally or militarily.