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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?

From OED, the dialectal survivals like Yorkshire thaa reflect unstressed variants of thou (which were short); thou is a long vowel that has gone through the Great English Vowel Shift—just as house has an /aʊ/ vowel, and is still pronounced huːs in Scots.

The irregularity is you, and apparently the yow pronunciation was around in the 17th century and survives in dialect. OED has a somewhat convoluted account, but the bit of it I find convincing is ēow > you patterning with new, as a /iuː/ instance exempt from the Vowel Shift:

In early Middle English the initial palatal absorbed the first element of the diphthong /iu/ (the regular reflex of Old English ēo plus w ), resulting, after the shift of stress from a falling to a rising diphthong, in /juː/; a stage already reached (in some speech) by the early 13th cent. (compare the form ȝuw in the Ormulum). Middle English long ū thus produced was subject to regular diphthongization to /aʊ/ by the operation of the Great Vowel Shift, as is attested by some 16th- and 17th-cent. orthoepists, who also provide evidence that by the second half of the 17th cent. this pronunciation had come to be regarded as a vulgarism; it survives in a number of modern regional English varieties. The modern standard pronunciation derives partly from a Middle English unstressed variant with short ŭ , subsequently restressed and lengthened, and partly from a form which preserved the falling diphthong /iu/ and subsequently shared the development of other words with this sound (e.g. new adj., true adj.) in which the shift of stress to /juː/did not take place until later; see further E. J. Dobson Eng. Pronunc. 1500–1700 (ed. 2, 1968) II. §§4, 178.

(The unstressed variant of you with short ŭ would be pronounced yuh; it is of course the form usually spelled ya.)

The criterion for a deactivation appearing in Necrologue is that it is accompanied by another action indicating either sanction from Quora, or user dissatisfaction with Quora: Category definitions by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue.

People deactivate all the time, and users did not want Necrologue to be filled up with random reports of other users taking time out for exams; at user request, Argologue was set up separately, for users who are just taking time out of Quora for Real Life-related reasons.

Jordan has not indicated why she’s deactivated, or how long she’s deactivated for; so I have not reported her for either.

It has been alleged that several Quora accounts have been hacked in June 2017, with spurious deletion requests issued by the hackers, and promptly honoured by Quora. The team of users investigating the breach have identified a couple of vulnerabilities related to Cloudbleed as the likely culprit, possibly via Zendesk (used to manage email communications between users and Quora). Read recent posts on The Insurgency and Cordially Resistant for more.

(The group’s own blog has just been deleted, possibly as a reaction to Top Writer complaints, and the group lead has deactivated his account.)

At least one user impacted reports that he is in conversation with Quora to get his account restored, and the claim has been brought to Quora’s attention via intermediaries on the Top Writer Facebook lounge.

So Quora may be helping those whose accounts have been hacked.

To my knowledge, Quora has not to date communicated about whether the claims are true or not, nor what precautions users should take. (The Quorableed group recommend changing both your Zendesk password and your Quora password.)

The reticence of Quora to communicate to its user base on Quora is longstanding. I am A2A’ing Tatiana Estevez and Jonathan Brill.

EDIT: Update on Account Deletion Processes by Paula Griffin on The Quora Moderation Blog

The in-universe explanation (to treat Greek mythology like fantasy fiction, and that’s not that absurd really) is

He was renamed Heracles [“glory of Hera”] in an unsuccessful attempt to mollify Hera. (Heracles – Wikipedia)

Stepping behind the curtain, in his monograph on Greek religion (p. 322), Walter Burkert says the name might be a coincidence; but he thinks it likelier that Heracles being subject to Eurysthenes and his protector goddess Hera, and the multiple instances where Heracles cross-dressed, point to a hero whose very point was that he could fall from being the son of Zeus to being disempowered (oppressed by a female goddess, cross-dressing like a woman).

Back when I was lecturing, I made a consistent effort to be the weirdest thing in the room. If I was running late, I would boom the opening words of my lecture while walking down the corridor into the theatre. I would walk into lecture drinking a Slurpee, and remind students that no eating or drinking was allowed in the theatre. I would reuse my Introduction To Linguistics slides from the previous year, and point out that the essential nature of human language had not altered significantly in the past 12 months. I would intersperse my lecture with random dated pop culture references from the 90s and dad jokes. I opened my first lecture on historical linguistics in Old English. I paced the room, gesticulating and expostulating.

Of course you are not surprised to read this.

I was something of an acquired taste, but I had a mature age student point out to me that during my lectures, you could hear a pin drop.

As a result, and being transfixed by my own antics, I didn’t notice any weird happenings among the students. I had colleagues that did. One colleague noted the incongruity between the couple taking notes above the desk, and what their hands were doing to each other below the desk.

Alas, I was absent the day my peers brought a stripper to scare off the curmudgeonly lecturer during his final Fortran lecture. (It didn’t work. “You are not a student enrolled in this course! Please leave!”) I was there, however, when a group of students performed the Dutch national anthem for our Dutch computer architecture lecture, and the Danish national anthem for our Danish operating systems lecturer.

I was in fact the soloist.

Wilhelmus van Nassouwe ben ik, van Duitsen bloed….

• Nick Nicholas’ answer to Did Quora add emoji support?
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why doesn’t Quora allow the use of emoticons, when it would make the site more interactive?
• Evgeniy Pavlov’s answer to Why doesn’t Quora allow the use of emoticons, when it would make the site more interactive?

Appropriateness is always relative. We might like to think that there are universal norms applicable to all people and all situations. It simply does not work like that.

Profanity signals intimacy, because it presupposes a level of trust that the addressee will not take offence, and it situates the interlocutors as both being rebels against outsider norms of propriety, which signals solidarity. The same reasoning applies to the old taboos on sex and scatology, and the new taboos on race and sexuality.