Category: Uncategorized

Nicomachean Ethics

OP’s excerpt:

“Verbally there is a very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, and identify living well and faring well with being happy; but with regard to what happiness is they differ, and the many do not give the same account as the wise. For the former think it is some plain and obvious thing like pleasure, wealth or honour…”

The original, 1095a:

ὀνόματι μὲν οὖν σχεδὸν ὑπὸ τῶν πλείστων ὁμολογεῖται: τὴν γὰρ εὐδαιμονίαν καὶ οἱ πολλοὶ καὶ οἱ χαρίεντες λέγουσιν, τὸ δ᾽ εὖ ζῆν καὶ τὸ εὖ πράττειν ταὐτὸν ὑπολαμβάνουσι τῷ εὐδαιμονεῖν: περὶ δὲ τῆς εὐδαιμονίας, τί ἐστιν, ἀμφισβητοῦσι καὶ οὐχ ὁμοίως οἱ πολλοὶ τοῖς σοφοῖς ἀποδιδόασιν. οἳ μὲν γὰρ τῶν ἐναργῶν τι καὶ φανερῶν, οἷον ἡδονὴν ἢ πλοῦτον ἢ τιμήν

All three instances of happy in the passage are translated as eudaimonia; the “being happy” word is just the equivalent verb, eudaimonein.

There are a lot of words for happiness, with different etymologies and connotations. The LSJ gloss of eudaimōn (literally, good-daemon) is “blessed with a good genius”. So: your guardian angel is good to you. (The “genius” is the old-fashioned equivalent of the guardian angel.)

Then again, happy in English originally means “lucky” (as in hap-penstance), which is what eutykhēs means. The etymology pushes the word down a certain track; but it it isn’t the full story of what the word means.

To my modern ears, eudaimonia means you’re in a good place, things have worked out well for you. (Etymologically, the daemon has seen to that, though you don’t need a guardian angel to end up in a good place.) And as Aristotle says, that’s not just because you happen to be a stud, loaded, or a celebrity.

EDIT: Lau Guerreiro, you have checked out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eu… as well, right?

There is the general answer, and then there is my answer.

For the general answer, I could not hope to rival the eloquence of Michael Masiello. But as a grotesque injustice to Michael, I think the anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin does rival him.

Mikhail Bakunin, What is authority? (1882)

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.

I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

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That’s what we all should do.

What do I do?

I look for a tone that suggests the person knows what they’re talking about. Depending on the subject matter, it includes preparednesss to concede weaknesses in their argument, extent of supporting detail, professional-sounding phrasing, orderly presentation. Those things aren’t proof, but they are correlated with an argument that I can follow, and verify to myself.

There are plenty of ideological answers that start from different axioms. There’s no real point questioning axioms; they are departure points, not conclusions. One can only ultimately reject axioms by rejecting the whole edifice built on them. As a shortcut, there are perspectives I have rejected—as have we all; so I will be biased towards answers that share my axioms.

But I am prepared to be convinced by answers, phrased in good faith, that have different starting points to those I favour, but still are coherent and persuasive.

I’m less open than I’d like, but not completely closed.

Formal qualifications don’t mean that much to me (and I find Quora’s preoccupation with them amusing). I got a PhD, and I know how the sausage is made. A PhD doesn’t guarantee you know what you’re talking about, though it does mean you have some project management skills. Being exposed to a discipline’s norms and discourse, however, does mean a lot to me. To give an example, I don’t reject Tim O’Neill for being an amateur historian; he’s as thorough and as well-read as any professional. He’s also as unpleasant as any professional, which is why I don’t particularly seek his answers out; but his reasoning, as opposed to his tone, are legit.

To give a second example, Brian Collins is still finishing an MA in linguistics; and from the breadth of what he discusses, and his familiarity with the literature, I’ll take what he has to say as seriously as any linguistics PhD on here. (There aren’t that many.)

The photo is a cultural touchpoint as a depiction of harassment of women. It is often cited as such, including on Quora. And people are astonished (including on Quora) to find that the photo was likely not intended as such at all.

I’m throwing the question up to see what others think; what I’m finding, from googling, is no.

See the following on the series of photos:

American Girl in Italy: Behind the Iconic Photo

The question is opened up by the discussion at Michael Margolies’ answer to What are some of the most widely circulated fake pictures?, between Michael Margolies and Sarah Jansen. As Michael argues, based on the model’s reminiscences (in the link above),

At the time no, if you read what the model writes about the series and this image it’s interesting to see how even her point of view evolves. What she and the photographer wrote about after making the series and what she writes more recently has evolved just as our politics and perspectives have changed.

Sarah retorted with:

So why was she directed to look fearful?

And was not satisfied that the model’s reminiscences reflect what the photographer had in mind.

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Well, let’s try and reconstruct what Orkin had in mind from what evidence we have.

Biography : “At 17 years old she took a monumental bicycle trip across the United States from Los Angeles to New York City to see the 1939 World’s Fair, and she photographed along the way.” (Style of Sport features Ruth’s bicycle trip from 1939)

Ruth Orkin: “The photograph was part of a series originally titled “Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone.”” (and almost all the other photos in Michael Margolies’ link show Jinx having a ball). The titling was the creator’s.

Orkin’s daughter relates: American Girl

The two were talking about their shared experiences traveling alone as young single women, when my mother had an idea. “Come on,” she said, “lets go out and shoot pictures of what it’s really like.” In the morning, while the Italian women were inside preparing lunch, Jinx gawked at statues, asked Military officials for directions, fumbled with lire and flirted in cafes while my mother photographed her.

Orkin herself relates: Ruth Orkin | American Girl in Italy | The Met

“We were having a hilarious time when this corner of the Piazza della Repubblica suddenly loomed on our horizon,” the photographer recalled. “Here was the perfect setting I had been waiting for all these years…. And here I was, camera in hand, with the ideal model! All those fellows were positioned perfectly, there was no distracting sun, the background was harmonious, and the intersection was not jammed with traffic, which allowed me to stand in the middle of it for a moment.”

From the link American Girl in Italy: Behind the Iconic Photo, Orkin staged a shot with the same model going for a vespa ride with the guy that was leering at her, a few shots before.

My guess about the answer to Sarah’s question? I think Orkin was subverting the notion that the tourist was right to be afraid, in the iconic shot, and her overall message is the “look at the good times you can have as a single female tourist in Italy, if you’re not afraid” theme of the rest of the shoot. With a shout out to her own cross-country adventures at 17 in 1939.

It doesn’t look like the viewer was meant to take the fear any more seriously than the confused squinting:

And in her diary: (An Image of Innocence Abroad), Orkin described the shoot as a “satire”.

The linked article concurs with the analysis:

In its rebirth, however, the photograph was transformed by the social politics of a post-“Mad Men” world. What Orkin and Allen had conceived as an ode to fun and female adventure was seen as evidence of the powerlessness of women in a male-dominated world. In 1999, for example, the Washington Post’s photography critic, Henry Allen, described the American girl as enduring “the leers and whistles of a street full of men.”

You can argue that the sexual politics I’m claiming of Orkin is as naive as you’d expect out of the 50s. But it looks like it’s authentically naive: Orkin may well have thought that she was making a statement for emancipated, empowered single women (like herself and Jinx) travelling the world, and shrugging off the street harrassment.

I mean, you tell me. If that’s not what Orkin had in mind when she had Jinx look scared, then why does she have Jinx on the back of the vespa in the next shot? The resolution is appalling, but she does not look like she’s on the vespa unwillingly…

This is a very poorly phrased question, Anon; hard to tell what you’re after.

Wikipedia: Megasthenes

Megasthenes (/mᵻˈɡæsθᵻniːz/ mi-gas-thi-neez; Ancient Greek: Μεγασθένης, c. 350 – c. 290 BC) was a Greek ethnographer and explorer in the Hellenistic period, author of the work Indika. He was born in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and became an ambassador of Seleucus I Nicator of the Seleucid dynasty possibly to Chandragupta Maurya in Pataliputra, India. However the exact date of his embassy is uncertain. Scholars place it before 298 BCE, the date of Chandragupta’s death.

Megasthenes’ Indica survives only in quotations from later authors, such as Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, and Arrian in his own Indica. The Wikipedia article links to

• Ancient India As Described By Megasthenes And Arrian by Mccrindle, J. W : an 1877 publication of the fragments;
• http://www.sdstate.edu/projectso… : PDF of the same
• http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Ind… : excerpt of Arrian’s Indica, citing Megasthenes.

Megasthenes and Ctesias are the first two Western sources on India, and Ctesias’ was Persian hearsay, so Megasthenes’ is the first account at first hand. It still had a lot of fairy tales such as “people with backwards feet, ears large enough to sleep in, no mouths, or other strange features”.

You’ll need someone with more expertise in history than my glance at a Wikipedia page, Anon, to work out how important Megasthenes’ account is historically. If that indeed is what you are after…

A: no. 🙂 Transliteration reform has already happened in Greek, and it’s concentrated around simplifying vowels. No more omega for long o’s or eta for long i’s or <ai> for long e’s, as in Φλωμπέρ <Flōmper> = Flaubert, Σαίξπηρ <Saixpēr> = Shakespeare.

But at least those reforms have made phonological sense. This wouldn’t.

And B: I question the premiss. Cypriot stops work differently to Standard Greek stops: Standard Greek has a contrast of /(n)d/ ~ /t/ (ντ ~ τ), whereas Cypriot has a contrast of /nd/ ~ /t/ ~ /tʰ/ (ντ ~ τ ~ ττ). As a result, video and taboo are transliterated in Cyprus as βίτεο, ταπού <viteo, tapou>: <t> is considered there closer to /d/ than <nd> is.

Cypriot does not use βίδεο, ταπού: in Cyprus as in Greece, they would represent /viðeo, tavu/.

But that’s not because Cypriot is more rational than Standard Greek, with its <vinteo, tampou>: it’s because Cypriot is phonologically different, and is far enough from Greece to have its own transliteration norms, even if Standard Greek is the official language there. It’s also why Schubert in Cyprus is spelled Σιούπερτ <sjoupert> and not Σούμπερτ <soumpert>: <sj> = /ʃ/ in Cypriot.

Choice of script is always about ideology. Always. It’s not about linguistic rationality. In fact, when the missionaries or linguists come to town and start devising orthographies for previously unwritten languages, one of the language communities’ frequent concerns is that their orthography should look different from the tribe down the road.

Latin swept the Middle East as a vehicle of Westernisation in Kemal Atatürk’s time. That was Kemal’s ideology: it was hardly ideologically neutral, any more than Arabic script was. Yes, Ottoman Turkish orthography was pretty damn clumsy; but that wasn’t the main reason for the switch.

And yes, there has been a merry-go-round of script reform in the former Soviet Union, from Arabic to Cyrillic to Latin. But that’s not primarily about rationality either. It’s about (a) the old link to Islamic culture being broken by Communism, and (b) the new links being drawn to Pan-Turkism. Nothing neutral there either. Moreover, given the disruption introduced through Communism, scripts there now have the Lindy effect (thanks to Adam Mathias Bittlingmayer for introducing me to the notion): the scripts are now not long enough entrenched to resist replacement.

But Persian? Why does Persian use Arabic? Because Islam. And because no Kemalism or Pan-Turkism. And because Westernisation is not as compelling to them as it was to Kemal in 1920.

I have a soft spot for Greeklish, the adhoc online Latinisation(s) of Greek (Nick Nicholas’ answer to How are Greek characters written with Latin script?). But we’re not talking YouTube comments here. We’re talking the entire literary culture of Modern Persian, all the way back to Fedrowsi. Kemal made the decision that Turkey could break with its Ottoman literary past. I’m not seeing even the most ardent Zoroastrian emigré say they’d want that.

The flower violet is ἴον /íon/ in Ancient Greek.

In Modern Greek, μενεξές /menekses/ < Turkish menekşe < Persian بنفشه ‎/banafše/ and βιολέτα < Italian violetta are more common.

Βιολέτα – Βικιπαίδεια

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EDIT: the colour: in Ancient Greek ἰάνθινος “violet-flowered” or ἰόεις. Just as well, because ἰώδης is “rust-coloured = verdigris, green” (from the similar noun ἰός).

Modern Greek? You’ll occasionally find the derived terms μενεξί, βιολετί. But good old French μώβ (mauve) is the default for all variants of purple; and before it, I’m pretty sure it was λουλακί “indigo”.

Other respondents have answered about Linear A, of which we know only that is probably inspired Linear B, and it was very unlikely to have been Greek.

We also have a few inscriptions, from Classical times, in Eteocretan language, a non-Greek language written in Greek characters. It’s reasonable to assume it’s the same language was what the Minoans spoke, though it’s not definite.

We only know two words from what little parallel Greek–Eteocretan text we have, and we know that it doesn’t look like any language we know from the region, including Semitic or Indo-European. We also know that it had syllabic consonants: lmo is a word in Eteocretan.

(From Praisos 2)

Christine Kenneally (born in Melbourne, Australia) is an Australian-American journalist who writes on science, language and culture. Trained as a linguist, she has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Slate, New Scientist, and Australia’s Monthly, among other publications.

Christine Kenneally is someone I resent the hell out of, because she went to the same linguistics department as me (she was a couple of years ahead of me), and she’s famous and I’m not. 🙂

Before she switched from linguistics, she did an honours thesis on glossolalia, under Mark Durie. Mark Durie has also since switched from linguistics; he’s now a pastor (Charismatic Anglican), and is prominent in anti-Islam polemics.

Christine’s conclusion was that the linguistics structures of glossolalia match Anglo stereotypes of foreign languages: CV structure, simple phonetics, simple vowels. Nothing linguistically exotic. It’s like asking someone to “speak African” if they know nothing about African (including click languages).

Anecdote had it that the supervisor–supervisee relationship was an uncomfortable one.

I went to Sihler: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin

Indo-European fem sg: –e[math]H_2[/math]. Indo-European neuter o-stem plural: –e-[math]H_2[/math]. They are the same; as Sihler notes (p. 263) “identical in form with the nom.sg of -e[math]H_2[/math] stems (=first declension) and probably the point of departure for the creation of that stem.”—

(p. 266) “a connection particularly suggestive because of the otherwise puzzling lack of an overt case marker *-s on the nom.sg of the -e[math]H_2[/math]-stems.” (i.e. why is the feminine –ā and not –ās?)

“A historical connection between o-stem neuter plurals and the feminine –e[math]H_2[/math]-stems was made easier when it was discovered that in Hittite, as in Greek, the “plural” of the neuter was in a very real sense singular, as it construes with 3sg verbs. Before that discovery, there was room for debate over whether Greek syntax of the πάντα ῥεῖ ‘all things flow’ type was an innovation. But now it is clear that it can only be an ancient trait. The reinterpretation of a neuter plural as some kind of derivative (collective) singular is thinkable if *kʷekʷle[math]H_2[/math] (to *kʷekʷlom ‘wheel’) was not so much ‘wheels’ as something like ‘wheelage’, or perhaps indifferently one or the other. But the evolution of a whole new stem type and concord class (‘feminine’) from a single form is not easy to trace in detail.”