Category: Uncategorized

I’m afraid I’ve already exhausted my store of proverbial wisdom in previous answers:

• See: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some weird expressions?
• See: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your favorite proverb from your culture or country? What country is it from?

For starters, in the West, Greek affixes were used in scholarship, where it was felt they were more nuanced than what Latin had to offer. Suffixes to express ethnicity were felt to be a less rarefied domain, and English and Latin between them had it covered.

For seconds, Greek differentiated between suffixes denoting ethnicity, and adjectival suffixes. –ikos was only the latter. So a vase might be Athēnaïkos, but Thucydides could only ever be Athēnaios. Just as he was a Hellene, and not a Hellenic.

That’s why when the –ic suffix is used against countries, as OP noted, it is used as a scholarly specialist term, rather than as an ethnic term, and it is used as a convenient way to differentiate a major language from its superfamily. Germanic vs German, Turkic vs Turkish.

This is terribly inconvenient for Greek, in which Germanikos and Tourkikos are merely the adjectives for German, Turkish. The former is accordingly rendered as Teutonikos instead, but such synonyms are not usually available. The only real solution for the latter is to call them Tourkogeneis Glosses, Turkogenous languages — that is, languages that originated from (small-t) Turks.

There has been a longstanding surmise amongst disgruntled Quora users that Top Writers are treated more leniently by Moderation than other Quora users, particularly when it comes to BNBR.

I’ve recently stumbled across what may be the smoking gun for this surmise:

Jon Davis’ answer to What was the 2017 New York Top Writer’s meetup like?

I also got to finally meet two employees of Quora who I simply had to greet with, “Oh! Jonathan Brill/Tatiana Estévez. I’m Jon Davis and I’m so sorry!” I say that because the topics I write in cause more moderation headaches than just about anyone on the site. Since Jonathan Brill gets all reports about Top Writers, I’m sure he spends a good chunk of his professional life weeding through my content to see if this time the report was valid. Since they are the only two people who must become well acquainted with my work, I had to thank them sincerely. All kidding aside, I’m really glad I got to attend to meet them both. I am often in the middle of sophomoric nonsense by people who really don’t like different ideas, so that makes me interact with moderation a lot. So it was a great experience meeting the people who back up the fact that I’ve (usually) done nothing wrong far more than I give them credit for. It’s nice to get a face on the people you often only interact with in “times of inclement weather”. Followers of my blog The War Elephant (website) know what I’m talking about.

Add: https://www.quora.com/If-youre-a…

I’ll be fine because moderation for Top Writers is always reviewed by humans. I’m frustrated for new writers because they are susceptible to the manipulation.

These two paragraphs indicate that reports against Top Writers are scrutinised by Quora Staff, in order to determine their validity, before any sanction is applied. Reports against other writers, by implication, are not subject to the same scrutiny, if any.

Before you all reach for your pitchforks, I’d like to try to discuss, dispassionately:

• What we do not yet know
• Why this is a good thing
• Why this is a bad thing
• What the implications of this are

What we do not know

This is a remark in passing by a writer on something discussed (leaked?) in the latest NY TW meetup. This seems to have been a fertile field for information about moderation, as we have also had information about moderation of anonymous content from it: Anonymous Screening.

• We don’t know how accurately Jon is relaying this, and we have not heard it from the horse’s mouth. That said, I’m not interested in disputing Jon’s veracity, and I will note that Jon in the same answer published an interview with Brill, and he was upvoted by Tatiana. If they really took objection to what he said, one presumes they would have reacted somehow.
• We don’t know how accurately Quora staff have communicated the status of TW moderation to Jon. For example, whether it really is every single TW, Old Planter TWs, highly popular TWs, controversial TWs.
• We don’t know how thorough or complete the human review of TW content is. Jon Davis’ answer to If you’re a conservative, have you ever felt silenced by liberal popular opinion or colleagues? nominates himself as the third most reported user on all of Quora, based on information from Quora staff; I’ve seen him nominate the second most reported user, also a TW. (I can’t find the comment, so he may have deleted it.) Even if there only a thousand-odd TWs, that means a lot of TW reports to sift through.
• We don’t know how long this has been the case.

Why this is a good thing

Let us see this from the perspective of Quora.

Top Writers are given the Quill because they generate the kind of content Quora wants to see more of, and they are cultivated to that end. The extent of cultivation is not clear to me, and from what I’ve heard, it’s less than I’ve assumed; but it does happen. Making sure that users who generate good content are not unnecessarily turned off from Quora is a good thing for Quora. And in fact, the intervention of Brill in reports demonstrates that good writers are maybe not as fungible to Quora as I’d assumed.

We also know that TWs, because of their visibility, are disproportionately targeted for reporting. (The same applies to highly popular writers who are not TWs; Feifei Wang has articulated this well.) Stepping in to weed out spurious reports is a more pressing need for highly visible writers.

Special treatment of writers who have proven themselves is longstanding, and reflects increased confidence in their output—which underlies Quora giving them the Quill in the first place. We know that a good track record with Moderation is one the criteria for getting the Quill. We know that the Collapsebot stops collapsing short answers of writers who have been here long enough—I stopped being collapsed after six months. This is more of the same: writers that Quora has confirmed are in good standing are given more of the benefit of the doubt.

Special treatment does not mean impunity. Quora, in weeding out reports, acknowledges that many of them are spurious; it also weeds them because some of them are not. As it happens, Jon Davis himself is currently on a two week edit block.

Quora is a private entity, that pursues moderation for its own ends of providing a safe environment, comfortable for its users and for its advertisers. It is not obligated to prioritise fairness over these goals.

Why this is a bad thing

I have already posted about how Quora Moderation violates the norms of natural justice (Nick Nicholas’ answer to Should Quorans be allowed to present a statement of defense before being sentenced to a permanent ban?): “Noone should be a judge in their own case”, and “Hear the other party.” Those norms are there to guarantee equity before the law.

This revelation indicates that Quora Moderation is also violating equality before the law. The title of this post is an allusion to the Tribunal des maréchaux de France, the court system specific to the nobility in pre-Revolutionary France. Pre-Enlightenment regimes routinely thought equality before the law was ridiculous, though that did not mean the nobility had impunity.

(The tribunal des maréchaux was also called the tribunal du point d’honneur, because they were meant to replace duels, fought on points of honour. At least that much, we are being spared.)

(For now.)

There is little incentive for Quora to repair problems with moderation, such as the long queue of appeals (congratulations on hiring Roger), the more draconian criteria now being applied to BNBR (as at least some former moderators now acknowledge), the refusal to consider context let alone content, the lack of transparency, and so on. If the most visible and trusted writers are exempt from the worst of Moderation, then the users who could advocate for Moderation reform the most are deprived of any motivation to. Jon Davis himself has said “moderation is now better than it was”, because he is no longer being sanctioned as much as he used to be. Those without a Quill, as he acknowledges, still are.

Differential treatment is divisive, and supports feelings of entitlement and resentment. It’s not a surprise that Quora has not stated this is going on publicly; then again, it states very little publicly. There is a reason why Equality Before The Law matters to those subject to the law. And there’s a reason why users deserve to be made aware of this.

What the implications of this are

• Any defence of Moderation by a beneficiary of the Tribunal of the Marshals has to be seen in that light. Their experience of moderation is not the same as others’, and they are strongly subject to the The Tale Of The Stairs effect.
• There is an intrinsic bias in reporting against the highly visible, which presumably the Tribunal of the Marshals seeks to redress. The sans-culottes have no access to the Tribunal of the Marshals, and there will be no French Revolution. But the sans-culottes still get to report infractions. If you see someone doing the wrong thing, have no compunction in reporting them, whatever their status. (That applies, of course, just as much to those on Jon Davis’ side of the aisle, as to those opposite.)
• Moderation is still necessary. Just because there are issues with equity and equality does not mean that there should be no moderation, or that moderation is always or even mostly doing a bad job.
• We do not get a say in how moderation is run in a private concern. But information is power; it is, in fact, empowerment. And any reaction to Quora should seek to be informed.

I’m guessing rather than certain here, but Muslim Greek and Jewish Greek, as spoken by longstanding religious communities, did have distinct vocabulary about religious practices, and I’d have no reason to think prayer is an exception.

The two Turkish terms given in Murat Öz’s answer are namaz and ibadet. As noted in Τι είναι το Ναμάζι;, ναμάζι is frequent in Greek literature with reference to Muslim prayer, and has been used in the Greek press.

The one instance of ibadet in Greek I find on line is in a letter from a Greek bishop in the region around Drama, written in 1911 and available at Μικρόπολη Ιστορία Οθωμανική Περίοδος και Τουρκοκρατία Μικρόπολης Καρλίκοβα Δράμα Mikropoli Mikropolis Karlikowa Καρλίκοβα Μικρόπολη Μικρόπολης. It disapprovingly cites a local Bulgarian Orthodox (“schismatic”) cleric referring to Orthodox prayer as ιμπαντέτι; the Bulgarian is cited (in vernacular Greek with Turkish codeswitching) as saying “I am liberal: I would be happy to celebrate mass with the bishop. I ask no-one for permission about ibadet, neither the Exarch [Bulgarian church leader] nor anyone else, I’ll even yaparım ibadet [do prayer] with a hoca [imam].”

The call to prayer, adham, is referred to through its Turkish form ezam > εζάμι in the Greek press still, with reference to calls to prayer not only in Turkey, but also in Jerusalem.

The answer is not great:

Middle English phonology – Wikipedia

The phoneme /h/, when it occurred in the syllable coda, is believed to have had two allophones: the voiceless palatal fricative [ç], occurring after front vowels, and the voiceless velar fricative [x], occurring after back vowels. The usual spelling in both cases was ⟨gh⟩, which is retained today in words like night and taught.

These sounds were lost during the later Middle English and Early Modern English eras. The timing of this process was dependent on dialect; the fricatives were still pronounced in some educated speech in the 16th century, but they had disappeared by the late 17th. Loss of the fricatives was accompanied by some compensatory lengthening or diphthongization of preceding vowels. In some cases, the velar fricative [x] developed into /f/; as such the preceding vowel was shortened, and the [u] of a diphthong was absorbed. However, the palatal fricative [ç] in no instances became /f/.

Some possible developments are illustrated below:

• OE niht (‘night’) > ME /niht/ [niçt] > /niːt/ > NE /naɪt/ (by the Great Vowel Shift)
• OE hlæhhan (‘to laugh’) > ME [lauxə] > LLME /laf/ > ENE /laːf/ > NE /læ(ː)f, lɑːf/
• OE tōh (‘tough’) > ME [tuːx] > LLME /tuf/ > NE /tʌf/

This variable outcome, along with other variable changes and the ambiguity of the Middle English spelling <ou> (either /ou/ or /uː/ in Early Middle English) accounts for the numerous pronunciations of Modern English words in -ough- (e.g. though, through, bough, rough, trough, thought, with -ough- pronounced /ou/, /uː/, /au/, /ʌf/, /ɒf/, /ɔː/ respectively).

This is not the most sophisticated of answers; but one bugbear of all type designers outside of the Latin script (and Cyrillic, thanks to Peter the Great) is recent font kiddies slavishly copying the design of Latin fonts. Particularly serifs. Type designers in other scripts hate serifs. Serifs are a Latin thing; Peter the Great got them into Cyrillic, but they don’t belong anywhere else, and they look horrible when they do show up. As typographers often decry. Font kiddies.

I bought a coffee table book on the history of Arabic typography, and was rather puzzled to find the author thinking Arabic serifs were actually a good thing. Until I realised the author was in fact such a font kiddie.

Type designers also loathe Old English (i.e. Heavy Metal) fonts in other scripts. I’m not as sophisticated; I recently saw Chinese written in Old English style, and I rather liked it. But then, I can’t read Chinese.

But then again, it was quite elegant in its rendering of strokes. It wasn’t this version of Katakana (It’s a katakana font (named “ゴウラ”) designed to…):

… Yeah. I think the scholarly term is “font kiddies”.

As I am nowadays saying openly, I worked at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for 17 years, 13 which I spent working on word recognition. As a result, I got to know pretty well where all the obscure names were in Greek literature.

In the classical Canon, hands down, the Bibliotheca (Pseudo-Apollodorus).

Among online resources, THEOI GREEK MYTHOLOGY saved my bacon quite often.

Quite apart from the changing nature what is considered taboo in the English-speaking world, fuck has undergone weakening though overuse, and has lost its potency. It is simply not as profane as it used to be.

This inflation of profanity is a linguistic commonplace: 150 years ago, the profanity to avoid in polite company was damned. In fact, it is a characteristic of vivid language in general; that’s why slang has such a short shelf life.

From An introduction to Greek and Latin palaeography : Thompson, Edward Maunde, Sir, (1912), pp. 61–62, My summary:

The breathings and accents were invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, ca 200 BC—when the breathings and accents were still being pronounced. It is believed that they were promoted for the teaching of literary Greek, precisely because they were starting not to be pronounced.

Accentuation is not used at all in non-literary papyri, and only occasionally in literary papyri. By the 3rd century AD, their use had become systematic in literary papyri. When the transition was made to codices, they were dropped again (although they are added in to the early codices of the Bible); and they were not systematically resumed before the 7th century AD.

So, if the question is about why they were dropped in the 3rd century and resumed in the 7th century, well, not sure. The how though is not difficult: manuals of accentuation were written in Roman times, by grammarians such as Aelius Herodian, and had been preserved. Scribes just started paying attention to them again.

Iota subscript – Wikipedia, as Joe Venetos indicates, gives an account of its history. The iota subscript was invented in the 12th century AD; it had not been pronounced for the previous 12 centuries, and was only intermittently written as a silent letter. Again, the grammars and dictionaries had recorded where the silent iotas were supposed to be, and the scribes then decided to write it down as a diacritic instead.

As Zeibura S. Kathau notes, I did coin the term. I coined the term after my shock at the banning of Jimmy Liu, the first popular Quoran I saw banned, which sent me researching into how moderation on Quora worked. I found Scott Welch‘s articulation of the problems with moderation the most compelling, particularly I’m taking a voluntary break from Quora while I reassess my future here by Scott Welch on Scott’s House O’ All-Purpose Answers, written in the wake of RunOverChinesePedestrianGate.

What is most characteristic of use of dissatisfaction with Quora is that it is not a unified movement. In fact, I deliberately used the suffix –ite, used to describe factions (Jacobite, Blairite), as a joke, to highlight that there is no unified movement. (Even if Tatiana accused posters of forming one, just before she shut down Rage Against Quora.)

Inasmuch as there are any common threads, I would suggest they are the following:

• Belief in at least some of the stated aims and principles of Quora. Welchites, I believe, are disillusioned idealists rather than nihilists.
• Knowledge of the ins and outs of Quora, its community history, and its corporate history. Welchites seek to be informed critics. They are not “oh my god how could they ban X” or “if they keep this up, they will run out of writers”.
• Sarcasm against Quora, particularily its design and moderation arms. Scott used the expression The Mensa of Mountain View often.
• Mistrust. Welchites have been disinclined to give Quora the benefit of the doubt.

I don’t know that I can say much more than that, given that only 4 or 5 people have ever adopted the label.