Category: Uncategorized

I vaguely recall a story which hangs on the following premise: there’s a Greek word which can either mean lot or some type of food (omelette?).

This one continues to have me stumped. Both the Homeric moros and the Classical moira “fate” are derived from the word for “share”, just as “lot” in English is. moira has been a homophone of myrrha “myrrh” for maybe 1500 years (first as /myra/ then as /mira/); but I’m not seeing that pun.

Of Modern synonyms, other than those in Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer, there’s

• ɣrafto “what is written”
• riziko “what is at the root” (possibly also the etymology of risk, though I think the semantic development is different: risk < shoal at sea < boulder fallen from a cliff < cliff < (mountain root)”: What is the etymology and origin of the word “risk”?)
• pepromeno “what is fulfilled” (ancient participle, learnèd)

Nothing obvious there. The only halfway possible parallel, from this Synonyms Blog: μοίρα, is meriða. The main meaning of the word is portion (of food), and you can order a meriða of lamb at a restaurant. But the synonym list posits it’s also a synonym of fate (via the same metaphor of sharing as lot and moira.) That meaning is not given in the Triantafyllidis Dictionary, but it is one of the definitions given in Kriaras’ Dictionary of Early Modern Greek (Nathanael Bertos, 15th century: “The blasphemer has no part with God, but his portion is rather with the traitor Judas”), so it must have survived in some dialect or other.

Here’s a PhD on Bertos, if you feel like reading up on 15th century sermonising in Greek: http://ikee.lib.auth.gr/record/2…. Yes, the PhD is in Greek too.

This seems like a stretch; I’m sure that word isn’t it either. Thanks for the Google search you made me do though. Turns out Bertos’ homilies have just been published by Athanasiadou-Stephanoudaki, who wrote that PhD; I didn’t know that, and it’s always good to get more Early Modern Greek prose!

EDIT:

I think I’ve got it.

A strapatsaða is one of the names for a tomato and feta omelette; it’s also known as kaɣianas (from Turkish), and it’s equivalent to the Turkish menamen.

strapatsaða < Venetian strapazzada < strapazzare.

strapazzare: to abuse, maltreat something; to chop into little pieces.

There’s another cognate of strapazzare in Greek: strapatso “disaster, fiasco”.

It’s not the notion of “all sorts of stuff going on”, which OP recalls (and which is proverbially is associated with omelettes). But it’s the closest I’m getting.

Nick Nicholas timeline.

18:05

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are questions on Quora curated? If so, how did “Why did Loretta Lynch call for blood & death in the streets of the US March 2017?” ever get posted?

“Are questions on Quora curated?”

Only post facto.

Get reporting.

18:07

Why don’t we ban or declare war on Islam? [“Why don’t we ban or declare war on Islam?”]

With Christianity being the most persecuted religion, Muslims being most of the terrorists worldwide, and aiming to take over the world by reproducing, I see no reason to criminalize Islam, and maybe even reinstating the death penalty for Muslims as jailing them would make prisons “no-go zones”.

Nick checks Edit Log: https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-w…

Question added by Anonymous.

Of course.

*Reported*

Improvements to Anonymity on Quora by Riley Patterson on The Quora Blog (March 2017)

• All anonymous content will be reviewed for spam and harassment before receiving distribution

Anonymous Screening (Jack Fraser, June 2017)

So we finally have our answer:

There is human review as we were originally promised.

It just seems like they’re somehow doing it spectacularly badly!

https://insurgency.quora.com/Ano… (comment on Jack’s post)

Nick Nicholas:

—Can’t you see this ain’t good enough?

—I see what you mean.

—Then you give me some half-assed story about some delivery guy busting his arm. Look, Fawlty, if your chef couldn’t find the ingredients from that guy, why didn’t he get them from somebody else?

—Exactly. Hopeless.

—What?

—Completely hopeless.

—Right. You’re the manager, aren’t you? You’re responsible. So what are you going to do about it?

—… I’ll have a word with him.

—Have a word with him? Man, you gotta tell him, lay it on the line! Lay it on the line. Tell him if he doesn’t get on the ball, you’re gonna bust his ass!

(Fawlty Towers: Waldorf Salad)

Dialectal.

To clarify, the question is about the nominative singular ending of first declension feminine nouns.

Some of those nouns end in a short -ă, and they’re accented accordingly on the antepenult: thálassa “sea”.

The remainder end in either a long -ā or a long -ē.

The difference in Classical Greek is a matter of dialect.

• Proto-Greek, along with Doric and Aeolic, used -ā. So “day” was hāmérā.
• Ionic regularly changed ā pretty much everywhere to ē (aː > æː > ɛː). So “day” was hēmérē.
• Attic famously was in between: it changed ā to ē, except after r, e, or i. So “day” was hēmérā.
• The rule gets violated on occasion, because it wouldn’t be Ancient Greek if there weren’t exceptions. The exception is when there used to be a digamma (w) between the r and the ē: kórwā “maiden” went to kórwē in Attic, because the ā wasn’t following an r at the time. Then the w dropped out, and the word ended up as kórē.

Things got unpredictable in the Koine, because dialects got mixed up, and because Latin loans messed things up as well by keeping their final a.

The basis of Modern Greek is Attic, but there has been some analogy at play; ē (now i) can be used after r, though still not after e or i (they’ve been merged phonetically in that context to [j]). So the adjective “second” has gone from deutérā to ˈðefteri. But “thick” has gone from pacheíā to paxˈja [paˈça].

Do you mean, why is something as ludicrously unlinguistic as Snowball the state of the art of stemming in English? And why do we stem words, instead of doing detailed analysis of affixes, when we parse words in Natural Language Processing of English?

Because English lets us get away with it.

• There’s not a lot of morphology compared to other languages, and its morphophonemics is relatively clean, with some respelling rules—so stripping off suffixes is doable.
• Syntax does more work than inflection, so it’s not as critical to understand the inflections to work out what is going on in the sentence meaning.
• There’s limited and predictable amounts of inflection in English, so stemming is not that onerous. (The Snowball stemmer for English is quite a small program.)
• Our derivational morphology is only somewhat productive—so we can throw that work back on the lexicon; you couldn’t do that as readily for Turkish.

As a linguist, reading Snowball is deeply offensive. And if anyone is building a search engine for English text, and *not* adding a list of exceptions to your Snowball stemmer, you are doing your users a disservice. But English is such that it’s not as big a deal as it would be for other languages.

Tamara Vardo’s answer is most of the answer.

I think there’s a psychological component as well, though this is getting into speculation. It’s convenient for implicature to have xor on a scale before and, and to require the less natural notion of inclusive or to be expressed as a combination of the two, rather than allow it to be implicit.

But there is a notion underlying this, that xor is a more natural notion than inclusive or, to begin with. And that’s likely to do with humans making sense of the world through binary opposition: the notion that things are either X or Y, but not both, is very helpful if you’re trying to classify the world. The notion of things being both X and Y does not really challenge a model of the world through binary opposition: you’re just introducing a new binary opposition.

But I think the notion that things may be either X or Y, and you don’t care whether they’re both or not—which is what inclusive or means—undermines binary classification. Which is why it’s not the default.

See also: Which natural language differentiates exclusive and inclusive or?

Hello hellions.

Where does the Greek quote “βίᾳ ἤρχεσαν οἱ τριάκοντα τῶν Ἀθηναίων και τὸν δῆμον ἤδη κατελελύκεσαν” come from?

[Originally: Where does this come from?]

Not a very informative question, I trust you will agree. I have taken the this out of question details, and changed it to:

Where does this quote “βίᾳ ἤρχεσαν οἱ τριάκοντα τῶν Ἀθηναίων και τὸν δῆμον ἤδν κατελελύκεσαν” come from?

Which, one would have thought was the helpful thing to do.

QCR reverted me. I reverted it back.

QCR reverted me again. I reported it for vandalism, and reverted it again.

QCR reverted me once again. “However, the question has been flagged as possibly violating policy and will be reviewed.”

No shit, Sherlock.

Esteemed hellions, we know that QCR has longstanding problems with non-English, but this is worse than that. What is current best practice for getting QCR, aka Poster Boy about How AI Is Not Ready For Prime Time Yet, to shut the hell up? Reverting it and reporting it for vandalism is clearly no longer working.

Thank you, and SHUT UP QCR.

Are questions on Quora curated?

Only post facto.

Get reporting.

Googling finds:

“When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return”

Refuted in Wikiquote Talk:

Talk:Leonardo da Vinci

So to summarize what we know, based largely on the research of KHirsch above, the quote was first used in print (and misattributed to Leonardo da Vinci) in a science fiction story published in 1975, The Storms of Windhaven. One of the authors, Lisa Tuttle, remembers that the quote was suggested by science fiction writer Ben Bova, who says he believes he got the quote from a TV documentary narrated by Fredric March, presumably I, Leonardo da Vinci, written by John H. Secondari for the series Saga of Western Man, which aired on 23 February 1965. If this is correct, then the quote may have been written by Secondari for the TV documentary, and Ben Bova incorrectly assumed that he was quoting da Vinci. Accordingly, the probable author is John Hermes Secondari (1919-1975), American author and television producer.

Followup:

However, I should mention that a 1976 edition of Contact Quarterly, a biannual journal of contemporary dance, improvisation and performance, cites Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds as the source of the quotation. I don’t know where to get a translation of that Codex, but I imagine one must be available somewhere, so it can be checked. – Embram 16:15, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

• Having searched the ‘Codex on the Flight of Birds’ for the quote, nothing can be found that even closely resembles it. 2:22, 9 October 2013

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

How did I feel? Well, there’s a reason I run The Insurgency now.

It wasn’t about whether the sanction was fair or not. In fact, a former community admin told me, months later, “do you want to know why Jimmy was actually banned?” And I said no I don’t.

It was the impersonality of it. The surprise of it. The red banner landing with a thud, when I checked his profile to see why he hadn’t been posting lately. As Robert Todd put it at the time, “Do people often disappear from here as if the Black Maria picked them up in the middle of the night?” That was the first time I discovered that yes, they did.

Now, after 8 months of running Necrologue, I’m numb to it. I wouldn’t be surprised if my nearest and dearest here were whisked away by the Black Maria; enough of them have, after all. Pegah. De Guzman. Dockx. Habib’s and Masiello’s time will come; Welch has only avoided it by well-timed swerving.

I console myself with shining what light I can, on what I think needs it.

Through immersion.

Please read Daniel Ross’ answer and Jens Stengaard Larsen’s answer, which address the bulk of this.

The language you’re reviving is likely not going to be identical to the original language, as Jens points out; and that’s ok. I have a friend involved in language revival; she’s helping indigenous Australians reclaim their languages, and she’s careful to let them take the lead in the work (as you have to be). Because of both the dynamics of the situation (she’s not indigenous), and the fact that the community members are not professional linguists, she’s ended up skipping things like the ergative.

Yes. The ergative.

And that’s ok. The point after all is not to go back in a time machine and speak an identical language to that of the passed ancestors (even if that is the dream). The point is to revive something, and call it your own. And the most effective way to learn a language is still immersion, even if what you end up learning is not as historically sound.

Just as whatever got revived in the kibbutzim of Palestine was not a carbon copy of the Hebrew of King David: Hebrew had remained in use as a scholarly language, but there was plenty of Yiddish that got added to the mix, to get it speakable. The point was that the real revival of Hebrew happened in the kibbutzim, and not in the household of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. There was immersion in both places; the immersion in the kibbutzim was less meticulous than what happened to Itamar Ben-Avi—but also more humane, and more scalable.

At least the kids growing up in the kibbutzim were allowed to have friends who didn’t speak Hebrew.

Population of Jerusalem speaking Hebrew when Itamar was a kid: 1.