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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.

I’d argue there is. Aorist means “indefinite”, and was intended to mean “indefinite (unmarked) as to aspect”, which the Greek Aorist tense was, contrasting with both the Imperfect and the Perfect tense.

Tense naming conventions, however, are dependent on different grammatical traditions. Latin did not refer to aorists, and neither did Germanic grammars or Romance grammars; “simple past” is the term usual there.

Looking at Preterite – Wikipedia, I see that the English past “sometimes (but not always) expresses perfective aspect”. That would make it not so aorist. Then again, there were plenty of Classical Greek aorists that referred to completed actions—the aorist was the default tense, and you used the perfect only to emphasise that the action was completed.

So… yes, you can argue that the simple past is an aorist; but there’s no real point in changing the terminology of English grammar to say so.

Yes, it’s correct: “I looked deep into your eyes, and I saw our future.” I’d have used a more poetic verb for “see”, like atenisa “I stared right at” or antikrisa “I faced, I came face to face with”, but iða is fine.

Do use actual Greek script though. Κοίταξα βαθιά μες στα μάτια σου, και είδα το μέλλον μας.