Category: Uncategorized

Not a hip hop lyric, but then the OP didn’t put that in the question.

When I was a young lad, I lived in Crete, and I explored Cretan folk music, because that’s what you hear in Crete. One of the greats of Cretan folk music was Kostas Mountakis. Nikos Xilouris was greater and more versatile (and more photogenic), but Mountakis established the groundwork for the modern folk tradition.

One song I particularly liked was Άχι και σαραντάρισα, “Alas, I’m forty”:

Alas I’m forty by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile

Alas I’m forty, fit no more for love.
I feel like running crazy down the streets.

[…]

What’s to become of me? My soul, it shivers.
Like a snail feeler my gall bladder shrivels.

[tʃe leo ida θa ʝeno, tʃe tremi i psiçi mu
sa du xoxʎu to tʃerato ezarose i xoʎi mu]

I heard that song when I was maybe ten.

It was only last year that I realised that the song was censored. Last year.

It isn’t the gall bladder /xoli/ that’s shrivelling. It’s a word that rhymes with gall bladder.

And now you know what the Greek dialect word /psoli/ means.

Dedicated to Michael Masiello, for our latest exchange.

I am not aware of any Orthodox ban on laypeople buying bibles, if they could afford them. It may or may not have been seen as odd before the invention of printing.

The Greek Orthodox Church did have a massive problem with translating the Bible into Modern Greek, to the extent of getting a ban on translations written into the Greek constitution. It has been possible for laypeople to buy translations since 1638 (Bible translations into Greek); but the church of Greece seems to have only officially signed off on translations since the 1990s.

The resistance was more about fetishising the source language than about wanting the great unwashed to gain access to the original. The uproar around Ioannikios Kartanos’ paraphrase of the Bible in 1536 seems likewise to have been more about the fact that he used an Italian source text with a lot of apocryphal interpolations. But the Orthodox church was certainly no fan of people making up their own minds about how to make sense of the Bible.

The best answer I can find on why is Ajeet Gupta’s answer to Why do I have to log in to Quora to read content?

Ajeet Gupta argues that:

• Authenticated, eponymous users lead to higher quality answers—which is consistent with the Quora Real Names policy (which is severely undermined by anonymous users). But that does not explain why you have to log in just to read.
• Valuation: “Look! We have 10 million gajillion registered users! Please give us more money!” Which makes the most sense, though I’d have thought IP tracking has made tracking unique visits a solved problem.
• Establishing Token Cost (aka Keeping the Riff-Raff Out). Quora is invested in being better quality than Yahoo Answers, and if you can read, you can post—though it still seems an unnecessary extra step to force login just for passive consumption.
• Encouraging Community Effect. Having ID for who’s upvoting who is certainly useful to how Quora works (if only it weren’t in so much denial about being a social site); I guess they want the eponymous clicks badly enough, that they make you pass the extra hurdle of logging in: as soon as you can read the stuff, they figure, you’ll want to click and comment and answer.

There’s a cost in forcing login; I can only surmise that they think it’s worth it in terms of the increased quality of input they get, and aren’t worried about Reddit-like volumes. They get very highly ranked on Google, after all.

There is a gender-neutral word for sibling in Modern Greek, αδέρφι /aðerfi/, derived from the Ancient neuter diminutive ἀδέλφιον /adelpʰion/. But that word is first attested in the second century AD. So Chad’s answer stands.

It’s a fascinating question, and I don’t know that there is an existing word.

Partly, that’s sexism, and partly, that’s the bias of historical linguistics in explaining derivation: Martina is the “feminine variant” or “feminisation” of Martin, and it doesn’t occur to people to describe the relationship of Martin back to Martina. In the rare instances where a masculine name is derived from a feminine (Catarino < Caterina is the only one that occurs to me), I still think noone has bothered to describe the pair Caterina, Catarino as anything.

Zeibura S. Kathau, I miss having the kinds of pub conversations you’re having.

I like Uri Segal’s zeugonym, and Audrey Ackerman’s didymonym. (Haven’t seen you in my feed in a while, Audrey, but that’s because I’ve muted Game of Thrones 🙂

Heterophylonym “other gender” is the pedantic answer, but it’s too long. Heteronym is already taken; how about phylonym “gender name”? (Phylon is both “tribe”, hence phylum, and “gender”.) There seems to be only very little usage of phylonym in the sense of “phylum”.

Genos has a similar ambiguity between “generation” and “gender”, and to my surprise genonym is already defined to mean a generational name: An Alphabetical Guide to the Language of Name Studies.

If your grammar is bad (or even quirky), the grammar bot is going to ding questions as meeting improvement, based on the question. Automatically, because it is a bot. And regardless of whether you’ve posted anonymously or not, because it is a bot. If you edit the question, the “needing improvement” goes away; if the question is still ungrammatical, the “needing improvement” will eventually come back.

The bot has a fairly rudimentary understanding of grammar, and will ding questions even for things like apposition.

I have plenty of issues with Quora moderation, but dinging you for grammar is not really Quora moderation’s style; Occam’s Razor dictates that it’s the bot. Try dumbing down the syntax of the question, and refer to

What should I do if Quora marks my question as “Needs Improvement”?

Also, seek advice from the helpful folks at

Need help wording a Quora question?

You can use a diacritic only when it’s necessary to prevent confusion, or you can use a diacritic consistently, whenever the pronunciation goes one way rather than the other. In the former case, you reduce the number of diacritics in the language. In the latter case, you reduce the amount of pronunciation ambiguity.

English has a spelling system insane enough to be quite comfortable with pronunciation ambiguity (the more English historical phonology I learn, the more annoyed I get about it). And diacritics have never taken off in English. So the move to avoid diaereses within English, in general, makes sense: Diaeresis (diacritic).

But that’s one language community’s decision. It’s also why Pinyin users aren’t too fussed about <ü>. German does not think the same way about <ü>; and many languages value lack of ambiguity over avoiding diacritics. They don’t want to have to think about how the word is pronounced; if you have to think, you might as well use ideograms.

That’s the general principles. In the 19th century, English was friendlier towards diacritics; hence the profusion of graves like learnèd and diaereses like naïve.

Why does the New Yorker persist in the 21st century, against the global trend in English orthography?

I give you: the New Yorker logo.

It’s a consciously old-fashioned affectation. Of the kind that the New Yorker hopes its readers will find cute.

In addition to the answers from Elke Weiss and Niko Vasileas, note the wrinkle thrown up by Sheol: there is some evidence that Sheol is anthropomorphic in the Hebrew Scriptures, with a womb, a hand, and a mouth.

So Sheol corresponds to the House of Hades, the place (as indeed is the Christian usage of Hades: Christian views on Hades). But the Septuagint translators might have had motivation to map Sheol to Hades himself.

Dexterity in playing a musical instrument is all about muscle memory, not looking at the fingerboard. After all, you’re meant to play the violin while reading a score. And the fingerboard is in a rather awkward position to be staring at all the time anyway.

So, if there is no score around to be read, having your eyes open or closed doesn’t make any difference to how you play; and having your eyes closed helps with concentration, and figuring out what you’ll do next.

Eh, do you have to actually understand Farsi?

Thanks to http://alefbaye2om.org/tools/tra… (and we all know how reliable an online dictionary-based transliterator will be with an abjad and a millenium-old text), I have… attempted the following.

Vocaroo | Voice message

This… will be interesting.