Category: Uncategorized

Well, I guess it was just us then.

Spent three or four days over our honeymoon in Istanbul, pretty much Sultanahmet, with a couple of excursions to Üsküdar. Sultanahmet, certainly, is Grand Tourist Central.

I was astonished how few English speakers we found. Which proved particularly devastating when we got a taxi to Üsküdar, and when we got lost in Üsküdar, trying to find my wife’s cousin’s house.

Granted, I’m comparing Istanbul to Greece, where everyone has to know English if they know what’s good for them. In fact, I found it heartening for Turkey that people don’t have to know English. But I only found command of English in staff in really obviously touristy places. Not among the ordinary Istambullus, and not in normal shops.

Brian Collins is right, but let me try a different approach.

I do not nationalise the memes of production > I don’t nationalise…

Do not nationalise the memes of production > Don’t nationalise…

When that’s happened, it has now made don’t a word. The clitics that Brian refers to are bits of meaning, that semantically are different words, but phonetically are part of a word. Which applies to n’t.

So. Do you nationalise the memes off production?

You want to say this in a shorter way. But you now have a new word, don’t. And language really, really values consistency.

So you use that new word instead of respecting the underlying pattern. I’m sure it was weird 700 years ago. But the important thing here is, don’t isn’t a search and replace substitute for do not in all contexts. It is a new word, with its own grammar.

Of course, we don’t have an Academy in English to adjudicate on these matters, but we do have precedent and practice. Persian remains much more common, but there is some usage of Farsi. Wikipedia (Persian language) says:

The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has declared that the name “Persian” is more appropriate, as it has the longer tradition in western languages and better expresses the role of the language as a mark of cultural and national continuity. Some Persian language scholars such as Ehsan Yarshater, editor of Encyclopædia Iranica, and University of Arizona professor Kamran Talattof, have also rejected the usage of “Farsi” in their articles.

What Persian scholars like, I have to say, is not particularly decisive about how English will work, although English favours endonyms much more these days than other languages do. Or rather, a bunch of English-speakers do; I don’t, harrumph.

Both are used, use Persian as the default unless you have reason not to.

Religion in Greece

Which leads to the uncomfortable question, who counts as Greek people.

Well, if we leave out migrants from the past couple of generations, and talk about religions of long standing in Greece (using counts from the Wikipedia article linked, which also skip immigrants).

• The overwhelming majority is Greek Orthodox. 88% of 11 million as of 2011.
• The presence of Islam in Greece was substantial, and a large proportion of Greek Muslims were ethnic Greeks (particularly Crete). After the 1923 population exchanges, the only substantial Muslim population has been in Thrace, and is ethnically Turkish, Bulgarian (Pomak), or Roma. 100k.
• Jews have lived in Greece since Hellenistic times, and their numbers were substantially bolstered by the Sephardic exodus. Wiped out in the Holocaust, and those left did Aliyah. 7500.
• A Western Rite Catholic presence on the Greek islands (hence the Rebetika anthem Fragosyriani “Frankish [Catholic] girl from Syros”, written by Markos Vamvakaris, himself a Frankish boy from Syros). 50k.
• A minuscule Uniate (Byzantine Rite) Catholic presence: Greek Byzantine Catholic Church. 5k.
• An Armenian Orthodox presence bolstered by Armenians fleeing from the genocide. 20k.
• Some evangelism from Protestants since the 19th century. 30k.
• Some Hellenic Neo-Pagans. The peak body Supreme Council of Ethnic Hellenes has 2k members.
• Jehovah’s Witnesses: 28k.

A sequel to Pegah and Lyonel’s mutually assured destruction.

Edward Conway, bless him, commented:

https://galleryofawesomery.quora…

This brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “A Song of Ice and Fire”. I look forward to watching the battles play out between Lyonel Perabo’s frozen tourist zombies (powered by the northern lights and the awesomeness that is Norwegian scenery) and Pegah Esmaili’s fiery dragons (back by a rich history stretching back thousands of years and the fastest Google Image search on Quora) :).

To which I responded:

https://galleryofawesomery.quora…

I am not undertaking to serialise these…

We know from Salvatore Cusa’s collection of church deeds from Sicily that Greek remained in use in official contexts until at least the 1300s—with the “correctness” of the Greek gradually degrading.

We know that the use of Greek in Calabria and Salento steadily declined, with much wider areas using Greek in the 16th century.

If the use of Greek was in gradual retreat over the past millennium throughout Southern Italy and Sicily, following the Norman conquest, then… well, then it happens to have retreated quicker in Sicily than in Southern Italy. The Calabrian enclave is certainly relatively inaccessible (that’s why it’s in the ‘Ndrangheta’s heartland).

https://www.quora.com/Have-you-e…

(Nick Nicholas): Jay Liu. Gone, never forgotten.

(Lyonel Perabo): We should have a memorial stone for him, somewhere…

Lyonel Perabo and Pegah Esmaili had an odd exchange in their respective answers Pegah Esmaili’s answer to What would you do if you were the only female in the world? and Lyonel Perabo’s answer to What would you do if you were the only male in the world? This mainly played out in the comment threads on each question.

Read them to contextualise this artist’s impression of their doom. A rather one-sided doom…

https://www.quora.com/What-would…

cc Pegah Esmaili, refer Pegah Esmaili’s answer to What would you do if you were the only female in the world?

There are two subgroups of Greeks in the general neighbourhood of Sparta, which were isolated from the Greek mainstream for a while, and who speak more archaic variants of Greek. You’ll hear people call them the descendants of Spartans. I don’t think it’s a meaningful thing to say; there’s been a lot of DNA traffic in the Peloponnese, and being a True Spartan is about the cultural norms that Bob Hannent alludes to—and which have not survived. Thank the Dioscurides.

One subgroup are the Tsakonians. Some derive their name from Laconians; some not. There is Doric in their language, but not as much as pop linguistics claims (Hubert Pernot was the most comprehensive student of Tsakonian, and a Doric skeptic). And Doric is not the most fascinating thing about the language anyway. And in terms of “national character”, they don’t seem to have been that different from their Greek-speaking neighbours.

The other subgroup are the Maniots. Their dialect is much closer to Standard Greek, but it still has distinctive archaisms. They have a reputation for ferocity, and were consumed by blood feuds; it took decades for the new Greek state to establish law and order in the area. Are they true Spartans? Well, they probably think so.

But yeah, having to provide an armed escort to people in case a sniper will get them during a blood feud (the xevgartis) may have been normal in Mani; but that does not make you King Leonidas.

In this map from Wikipedia, Tyros in the east is in Tsakonia, Oitylos and Gytheion in the south are in Mani, and Sparte is Sparta.

They are the two relationships between linguistic elements that define how language works, according to structuralism. They are complementary.

The syntagmatic relationship is how linguistic elements can be sequenced. It’s syntax. And morphology. And phonotactics.

The paradigmatic relationship is which linguistic elements behave in the same way in syntagmatic relationships. It’s lexicon. And phonetics. And the… other bit of morphology.

The syntagmatic relationship gives you the structure of language; the paradigmatic relationship defines the function of individual bits of language.