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.

Vocaroo | Voice message

Quora does have a method to protest editorial action. Though its efficacy is open to question:

On strike in support of Jay Liu by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile

Jimmy Liu has been banned: Why was Jimmy Liu (who changed his name to Jay Liu) banned? Is this because of name change? What do you think about it?

Among the responses to Do you think that Quora should have a method to protest a ban? is Kang-Lin Cheng’s:

If you want to “protest” the ban, the best thing any of us can do is to leave this site forever. A lot of people who had respect for Quora, if they live up to their word about how angry they are at Jimmy Liu’s ban, should do so if that’s what they believe.

I’m not leaving Quora quite yet. But following the precedent established in #RunOverPedestriansGate (Srikar Vallabhaneni’s answer to What are some of the most controversial answers ever written on Quora?), I am taking a two-week break from posting.

As so many did at the time: The Emperor Has No Clothes by Rass Bariaw on Rage against Quora.

It’s Quora’s rules, it’s Quora’s site. We have no stake in the company, and we have no real influence over its decision-making. (Posting to Rage against Quora is of dubious value, but I have submitted at least a post there.)

The only value we contribute to Quora the company (as opposed to Quora the Tribe, h/t I’m taking a voluntary break from Quora while I reassess my future here by Scott Welch) is our participation in Quora. Which we can chose to withhold.

Even if it’s meaningless to, even if it’s just a symbolic gesture. Per Lyonel Perabo’s answer:

He was banned because Quora is a private venture and in exchange for using it for free, we have to agree on and realize that we don’t have a say about the way the network works. […] We’re just non-paying users. Some of us have the ability to possibly bring some money to the company because of our content being featured on the platform, but that doesn’t mean that we get to have a piece of the pie. It’s a social network in a capitalistic system, that’s the way it works.

Going on a two week strike is a symbolic gesture I can live with. I don’t know that it will make a difference. It likely won’t. But I need to be able to look myself in the mirror. One of my tribe has been picked off, with no stated rationale, and a guessed-at rationale that I think is trumped.

I cannot not stand by and say it’s fine.

Ah, a soon-to-be 100+ answers question that Quora would block as a poll question, but should not because it is community building.

Reflexes.

When I was in high school, I went to the Victoria-wide tryouts for the student version of the Sale of the Century game show. I do believe I can find some pictorial material relating to this…

… Ah yes. The first flush of youth.

The first stage of the tryouts was a written test.

I got the top score in the room.

The second stage involved hitting a buzzer if you knew the answer to a question.

I was out first round.

Remembering events.

I’m great at remembering facts. Outstanding. Positively freaky. The human encyclopaedia.

Things that happened? I think the most frequent phrase I use to my wife is “I don’t remember.”

Which is a downer when she’s trying to reminisce with me about anything.

—Remember when we went to that lovely restaurant in the hills?

—I don’t remember.

—And when we were listening to Kenny G in the car park?

—I don’t remember.

—So what are we doing for our anniversary?

—I don’t remember.

—What do you remember?

—I don’t remember.

Visual Arts.

I know, it’s hard to believe given the quality of my pictorial contributions to Quora.

But astonishingly, I don’t get the visual arts. Poetry and music are where I’ve always been paying attention.

Not a song I know, but Googling gets me:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_ZaezBmA5nk

Πάρε φωτιά και κάψε με: Take Fire and Burn me, 1953. Lyrics: Kostas Manesis; Music: Yannis Papaioannou. Performer: Stelios Kazantzidis. stixoi.info: Πάρε φωτιά και κάψε με

Take fire and burn me, take your sweet revenge.
The way you’ve left me, best that I be ash.

I don’t want my life,
my soul loathes you.

Take knife and kill me, cut me into pieces,
so I need see no more your cunning eyes.

Make with your hands a noose, and squeeze my throat,
choke me so I’ll be free of my deep sorrow.

It’s a great song, thanks for introducing me to it. The lyrics are melodramatic, sure, but it’s got that classic, 50s perfection of laika, and is agreeably βαρύ. (“Ηeavy” literally; stern?)

If you take the definition of acronym as using the first one or more letters of the word, Russian does them a lot, and has done since Soviet times: Gazprom = Gazovaya promyshlennost, gas industry. German does them as well: Kripo = Kriminal-polizei. These syllabic acronyms (or syllabic abbreviations) were particular favourites of totalitarian regimes. From the Wikipedia article, I see Hebrew does them as well.

If you use non-initial syllables of a word, it becomes a Portmanteau. Portmanteaux don’t get used as abbreviations in English, but the Wikipedia article lists Indonesian for portmanteau acronyms. None of the other languages listed use portmanteaux in the same way.

Originally Answered:

Why do Greek, Latin, French, German, Russian etc. have masculine and feminine gender for inanimate objects?

The history of Indo-European gender, like the history of any language feature, is messy. The mainstream theory is that the feminine, in fact, was originally not animate at all, but came from the abstract and collective suffix *-h₂. You may be more familiar with the Greek form of that suffix: -(i)a.

Why does gender not align nicely with animacy, let alone sex? Because of analogy, and cognitive patterning: making up classes of things, and then lumping everything in the world into one of them, by family resemblance. The mechanism for this lumping is Conceptual metaphor.

We see this more obviously in non-Indo-European languages, which have a lot more “genders”. (In fact, by the time you get to a dozen of them, there’s no point calling them genders, and we call them noun classes instead.)

The pioneering work on the kinds of cognitive categories underlying noun classes is George Lakoff’s. His acknowledged classic takes its title from the membership of one of the noun classes of Dyirbal language, an Australian Aboriginal language.

The noun classes of Dyirbal are:

• I – most animate objects, men
• II – women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals
• III – edible fruit and vegetables
• IV – miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)

Lakoff’s classic was thus titled: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

Mind blown, Dimitra (who A2A’d)?

Greeks’ minds will be blown be the fact that πῦρ, γυνή, καὶ θάλασσα, “fire, woman, and the sea”, have been lumped together in an Ancient Greek maxim. (It has been attributed to Aesop: Πῦρ γυνὴ καὶ θάλασσα, δυνατὰ τρία, “Fire woman and the sea, these are the three strong things.” And Menander: Θάλασσα καὶ πῦρ καὶ γυνὴ τρίτον κακόν “Sea and fire, and woman is the third evil.”)

My mind is blown (though it shouldn’t be) by the fact that Lakoff had no idea about the Greek maxim when he wrote the book.