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Ah, I see this is the question where all the cool people hang out! Νικόλαος Στεφάνῳ, Δημήτρᾳ, Μιχαήλ, Ἰωακείμ, Βενιαμείν, Ῥοβέρτῳ τε ἐρωτήσαντι, εὗ πράττειν.

Related question, with rationales: What are the pros and cons of the Erasmian pronunciation?

When I am on my own, I actually mutter Ancient Greek aloud to myself, to try and work out what the hell is going on. (I’ve never actually learned Ancient Greek formally.) And when I’m muttering, it is of course in Modern Greek pronunciation. Which is motivated by familiarity, since I speak Modern Greek.

When I speak aloud to others, it is in reconstructed, because that’s what the word was as far as I know, and reconstruction makes Greek spelling make sense. In fact, I’ve had Greek classicists tell me “could you please stop using Erasmian to me?”

I don’t use Erasmian, because I find Anglicised or Germanicised Greek distasteful—Dzoys for Zeus indeed! But since I never learned Ancient Greek in an English-speaking classroom, I don’t have the pressure of Erasmian familiarity that Anglo classicists do. If I did, it would make much more sense for me to do so.

I occasionally try to do pitch as well. But no, it does not come naturally, and there aren’t many good models for it. (Search the phrase “Yodelling Martians” on Quora for more on what I think of it.)

Yes. Not by the magic of the fact that it is in writing, but by the fact that it has helped immensely in establishing and propagating conservative versions of the language, based on written records, as the most prestigious versions, which are learned in education and emulated in formal registers.

Given the time depth of the Mayflower, American English should really be a separate language from England English by now. And true enough, there are issues with mutual intelligibility in some registers. But the written norms of the two are close enough, and universally propagated enough, to have kept them in sync.

Universal literacy, and familiarity with the sagas, is widely held as the reason Icelandic has changed relatively little in the past 1000 years. It’s also one of the few places where prescriptive intervention has actually reversed a language change (flæmeli). Written Greek has had a similar effect on Greek dialect.

As I was informed by someone at Uni with an anagram generator:

Lickin’ Nachos.

Which I have done, but no guacamole for me, thanks. Just sour cream and tomato.

And NO CHEEZ WIZ! Jeez, GettyImages®, are you trying to kill me?!

Indigineity sounds Latinate, so it is being accepted in those contexts where a Latinate word makes sense. Particularly when the emphasis is not so much on an individual attribute, but on a more abstract construct. Cf. Maleness and Masculinity.

For example, if you want to talk about the factors that correlate with student performance in Australian education (a discussion I get exposed to), you’ve got Gender, Socio-Economic Background, Home Language, and… Well, Indigenousness just doesn’t sound as right, in the context of a statistical factor, as Indigineity. More reified, if you will. And indigineity is the only word I’ve seen in that context.

If male gender were invoked in that context, you would see Masculinity and not Maleness, for the same reason.

This is of course just reasoning by analogy; but that’s how language changes: by analogy.

I am returning from my self-imposed exile from Quora, which was in protest of the ban on Jimmy Liu.

No, I’m not over it.

I went on strike because I saw that the reaction to Jimmy’s ban would be just like the reaction to so many other bans: Michael Church’s, and Dorothy Clark’s, and Rass Bariaw’s, and however many more. People will fuss; and then they’ll get over it; and the caravan will move on; and nothing will change. Which is all very well if Quora is not a community, and not social media, and all that matters here is factual data-mineable answers, which will somehow get monetised.

Such, we guess (for who actually knows?) is the thinking behind Quora Inc., and what drives it. Those here that like Quora the Tribe (see on Scott’s House O’ All-Purpose Answers)… they don’t have the same priorities. To them, unique voices matter: that’s why they’re here.

Jimmy mattered. And I will not shrug off the fact that he’s permabanned.

The Black Maria has carted off many Quorans before, and will cart off many to come. Many with clear cause. Too many without. There have been protests about it on occasion, which Quora has made a point of not responding to. In fact, Quora makes a point of not responding to much of anything.

In the Elder Days, Quora Inc. was just as non-responsive; but moderation was a community matter. Mods were drawn from the community, and those mods have repeatedly recounted that decisions to block and ban were not taken lightly, were intensely debated internally, and followed intensive discussion with the ban subjects as well. The ban subjects may not have felt any better about it; but there was, if not transparency, at least some level of inchoate trust that the mods were our peers, were part of our community, and did not use their power lightly.

Quora now pursues moderation at scale. Moderation at scale means (a) not involving the community in moderation; (b) moderating by robot or by robotic human (“rule-bound”, the corporate term is); (c) not bothering to provide any explanation to the community (invoking respect of the blockee’s privacy); and (d) not providing any explanation to the blockee themselves.

As a result, you get RunOverPedestrianGate. You get a widespread impression that moderation is capricious, unrepresentative of the community’s norms, and has no checks or balances. As Scott Welch noted at the time, the fact that Marc Bodnick apologised about some of the blocks he issued made things worse: it confirmed those suspicions.

Trust is good. Squandering it is not.

If to Quora Inc. the Quora Community is an annoying side-effect, that gets in the way of that lovely, lovely machine learning data (as do the jokes and the memes and the languages other than English)—then of course there’s not reason they should bother cultivating the community, or treating it wth respect, or justifying their decisions. They didn’t set out to create a social media site to begin with, after all.

And the recurring response whenever anyone protests, from those who think Quora Inc. is doing a great job, is that we’re here at Quora’s sufferance, as the guests at Quora’s soirée, and if we don’t like the rules here, we can good and sod off to the backstreets of Reddit or *shudder* Yahoo Answers.

Well then. We are the guests at Quora’s soirée. But let’s not pretend all is well this evening. There are some nice canapés laid out, and some excellent conversationalists. But the roof has been leaky for a while; the waiters are incessantly rearranging the sofas; most of the hosts have not been sighted for months; there’s a disconcerting number of people milling around wearing balaclavas over their heads; and every so often, rent-a-cops show up and drag off people you were in the middle of talking to, and often enough, with no visible cause.

And if you say “gee, it’s a bit… Hobbesian in here”, some head prefect type says “Rubbish! BNBR has made this space wonderful! Wonderful! And if you don’t like the rules, there’s the door!”

Right.

So when I then hear someone gushing in the corner, “Who should play Adam D’Angelo and Marc Bodnick in a TV series about Quora?”, you’ll pardon me if I wince and turn away.

---

There are very hard limits to how one can protest the action of some company’s site that you pay no fee to. Especially when the site is a remote Leviathan. Venting on Rage Against Quora; blogging on Quora; asking questions on Quora; cc’ing the admins in comments; none of it makes a discernible difference. Those are the rules, and there is the door.

So if one’s actions will not change things, and one cannot just put up with it, what path remains?

Quit Quora? Always an option. But I currently still get too much out of Quora the Tribe, and giving value back to the tribe. The hassle from Quora Inc.’s endless interface changes, gimmicks, and moderation fails haven’t outweighed the benefits quite yet.

Go on strike, and withhold the fruits of your labour? Tick. But keep doing that, and you might as well have quit.

Short of that? Moderation is my current beef. I have never had a run-in with Moderation, and do not care to; and I acknowledge that BNBR is a nett benefit to Quora. But opaque application of BNBR is not.

Quora Inc. expects me to help out in their “moderation at scale” by using the Report button. I have no idea what happens when I hit the button. I have no trust that Quora Inc. make judicious and considered use of my hitting the button. And Quora Inc., by keeping silent, and blocking people for seemingly ludicrous reasons (which we can only guess at precisely because they are silent), are not doing anything to restore my confidence in their moderation process.

They can choose to do that with their process. I can choose not to be complicit in that process.

I will no longer use the Reporting functionality of Quora. If Quora Inc. won’t invest in my confidence, I see no imperative to invest in theirs.

The other respondents have covered it well. I’ll still answer redundantly.

• No coursework; so you can emerge with gaps in your knowledge about the discipline. I know I did.
• Not necessarily much of a seminar culture (may vary by faculty); so much less opportunity to refine your ideas against your peers.
• Much less networking opportunities, as it is a smaller country. Which means more corpses to step on if you’re going to end up with an academic position.
• One overseas trip if you’re lucky, when you’ve got to fit in any networking at conferences.
• No viva examination at the end of the PhD; so no sense of ceremony or moment, and no opportunity to defend your ideas.
• PhDs were introduced in Australia in 1948. Australia was at the time a lickspittle nowheresville colony as far as everyone was concerned (particularly academics): they deemed that noone in Australia was worthy of examining theses, and shipping candidates to Pomgolia for their examinations was not cost-efficient. So they had candidates submit for written assessment alone. And to this day, one of the external candidates has to be overseas.
• Pomgolia. Memorably defined once by People (Australian magazine) as “a small country to the south of Scotland”.

Hello, Aziz, and thank you for A2A.

I found out about Al-Hamidiyah a few years ago, and posted about my emotional reactions on my blog: opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr: Al-Hamidiyah.

I know that the settlers of Al-Hamidiyah fled Crete after Crete gained autonomy, and Christian Cretans started reprisals against Muslim Cretans. (In fact, as I found on Trove, the only time my hometown of Sitia was mentioned in the Australian press was for massacres of Muslims). The town Al-Hamidiyah was named after the Sultan who resettled them there.

I know that the folk of Al-Hamidiyah were ethnic Greek Cretans, and held on to their dialect and customs in Syria. So when the Greek journalists come visiting, they are touched by the maps of Crete on the wall, and the pure Cretan dialect, and the longing they express for their lost motherland. (Just like the Albanians who moved to Italy from the Peloponnese: Moj e Bukura More.) And they’re pretty chuffed that the folk of Al-Hamidiyah have not adopted the polygamy of their neighbours.

They don’t mention as prominently that the folk of Al-Hamidiyah want to visit Crete, but the Greek government won’t issue them visas. Or that the folk of Al-Hamidiyah are the “Turk Cretans” that Greek literature vilifies.

I know that my ancestral village of Zakros has what looks to be a pre-Hellenic name. And that the neighbouring abandoned Muslim village of Zákathos has what is pretty definitely a pre-Hellenic name (it’s almost identical to Zacynthus). Which means four thousand years of habitation, unplugged because of the population exchanges.

I know that the Cretan Turks could have remained the brothers of us Christian Greeks’, had the religion of Greece been Grecism instead of Christianity. (I’m alluding to the decision that Albania made, “the religion of Albania is Albanianism”.) Then again, if Greece were a cosmopolitan, non-sectarian nation, it would not have been Greece. It might have been the pan-Balkan confederation that Rigas Feraios had in mind instead.

Well, I’ve already answered the related question What do you know about Greek speaking Muslims (e.g. those in Hamidiyah, Syria)? I was tempted to merge the two questions, but the focus on Al-Hamidiyah is useful, because they’ve been so prominent in Greek media.

Outside of Al-Hamidiyah: I know that some Muslims in Greece that were subject to the population exchanges were neither linguistically nor ethnically Greek (notably in Macedonia), whereas others were both (notably in Crete, where up to half the population was Muslim in 1800). I know that the version of Greek they spoke had Arabic and Turkish words in it, just as the version of Greek that Jews spoke had Hebrew words in it, reflecting their different cultural orientation. I know there’s some Arabic-script literature by Greek Muslims, as you’ll find by googling “Greek Aljamiado”; unsurprisingly, Christian Greeks have not paid this much attention until very recently.

I know that Greek Muslims were more liberal in their Islam than those of the Middle East, with much greater Bektashi Order influence. Something they had in common with Muslim Albanians, in fact.

And I know that I find the story Ioannis Kondylakis: How the village turned Christian more poignant than its author probably did…

What my peers said. Being upbeat and in a good mood, having fun. To do something with kefi means you’re smiling, you’re doing it with gusto, you’re having fun. To have kefi is to be in a good mood.

Kefi is one of those Greek words that is routinely listed as “untranslatable”, because it has such deeply embedded cultural resonance. Like most of those words, it is a loan from Turkish. And at least in this instance (unlike say merak “hypochondria” > meraki “yearning; diligence in craftmanship”), the meaning in Turkish seems pretty close.

Representing Australia. (As is Miguel Paraz, and we’re working on him.) 44 yo. Second-generation Greek-Australian; had Greek exposure as a child, but not enough to make me other than a native speaker of English (though I learned American English from TV before I learned Australian English at school). General Australian, rather than Broad or Cultivated, I’d like to think; but then again, most Australians like to think that too.

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