Category: Uncategorized

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.

I echo other respondents in expressing frustration at the vagueness of the question.

In English, there are two diacritics that can be applied to <e> to change its pronunciation.

<è> is occasionally used to ensure that the <e> is pronounced and not silent.

Grave accent

The grave accent, though rare in English words, sometimes appears in poetry and song lyrics to indicate that a usually-silent vowel is pronounced to fit the rhythm or meter. Most often, it is applied to a word that ends with –ed. For instance, the word looked is usually pronounced /ˈlʊkt/ as a single syllable, with the e silent; when written as lookèd, the e is pronounced: /ˈlʊkᵻd/ look-ed). In this capacity, it can also distinguish certain pairs of identically spelled words like the past tense of learn, learned /ˈlɜːrnd/, from the adjective learnèd /ˈlɜːrnᵻd/ (for example, “a very learnèd man”).

I make a point of writing learnèd. Very very few people do.

<ë> properly is used to split up a digraph, so the preceding vowel and the <e> are pronounced separately; e.g. Zoë /zoʊi/. However, <ë> was occasionally used for the same reason as <è> was. So (Brontë family) Brontë was a much more posh-looking rendering of the Irish surname Ó Pronntaigh, than the normal anglicisation Prunty or Brunty. Tolkien picked up that function of <ë> in his renderings of Elvish languages.

Should they? No, because they don’t pass the threshold of Insincere or Trolling. And Quora has enough ease already in hammering down contributions to Quora.

However, such questions are indeed fingernails on a chalkboard to anyone living outside the US. A renowned Quoran of the Hellenic persuasion has once described such questions to me as αμερικανιές /amerikanˈjes/.

The colloquial modern Greek suffix –ja, plural –jes, < Mediaeval Greek –éa, is a flexible and expressive morpheme. It is not, however, complimentary.

Downvote the questions. They won’t go away, and they seem if anything to have been templated, which would mean that Quora was complicit in putting them up: Question patterns by Jay Wacker on The Quora Blog; Question Patterns (Quora feature)

Oh, you didn’t know about templated questions? Well, now you do.

Because such “commercials” are not inconsistent with Quora’s missions:

• publicly: to increase the world’s knowledge
• publicly, when the Founders let their mind wander: to serve as a cache/substitute for Google
• speculatively: to serve as a testbed for from sweet, sweet AI

They’re not very sociable, I admit. Even though I’ve done it myself, and recently at that. But, after all—all together now:

Quora is a Q&A site, not a social site.

To my amusement, when I googled for this in Australia, I found that I know the researchers that came up with the latest research on this. The latest research I found was 10 years ago, though (which is why I know them); and I don’t think the numbers will have stayed the same.

http://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/…

As of 10 years ago:

1. Japanese: 333k
2. Italian: 322k
3. Indonesian: 210k
4. French: 207k
5. German: 127k
6. Chinese: 81k

French and German are the inherited elite education languages (they’re what I did). The newspapers have been bemoaning the fall in Asian language enrolments; so Japanese and Indonesian will have dropped; Chinese as a community language will have risen and Italian fallen.

From Languages in Victorian schools, the most popular taught languages in Australia now are French, German, Indonesian and Japanese. That means Italian has collapsed as a community language taught in schools, and Chinese hasn’t broken through yet (which surprises me).