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Did Da Vinci say something like, “If you ever tried flying, you will look at the sky when walking and think that is your home”?
Googling finds:
Refuted in Wikiquote Talk:
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
How did you feel when you found out that Quora banned a person that you not only liked, but followed?
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.
As a teacher, what is the weirdest thing you have seen in your school or classroom?
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….
How can I use emojis on Quora?
How can a taboo word show friendliness or intimacy when it is inappropriate?
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.
Is there an upper bound to the amount of words a language will realistically contain?
If a language is agglutinative, or has a halfway decent derivational morphology, you can keep making up words based on other words for as long as you like, and those words will be perfectly acceptable. So there is not much of a limit.
There is a limit in how many building blocks of words (morphemes) someone can retain, and those morphemes will correspond to the vocabulary of someone speaking a purely isolating language. (Spoken Chinese isn’t as pure about this as it likes to think it is. Classical Chinese is, but classical Chinese is clearly heavily stylised.)
So, to turn this question into a question somewhat more clearly related to the limitations of human linguistic processing: how many characters can a Chinese speaker retain? Or, how big is the vocabulary of the average English speaker? (which is somewhat close to this, though English derivational morphology is still productive).
The answer for an individual is in the order of magnitude of 10,000. For a contemporary language with a wide range of specialist vocabularies, you are ranging across the vocabulary of all members of the speech community. That means you add one order of magnitude to the size of the available stock of morphemes; you don’t add two.
Answered 2017-07-04 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
When will Quora in Greek be available to users?
Since Profanity as such is no longer banned on Quora, my response is: Του Αγίου Πούτσου.
That can be paraphrased as “Never”.
(It literally means “St Penis’ Day”, because Greeks are strange like that.)
Nick Nicholas’ answer to After “Quora auf Deutsch” what is the next language Quora will target? is a summary of discussions Josephine Stefani, Clarissa Lohr and I have had about the likely Quora internationalisation roadmap.
The choice of Italian remains an oddity among the potential candidates. I am not convinced by the purchasing power of the number of Italian-speaking Google users that might stumble on a Quora answer in a search, and see an ad there (the bottom line explanation for Quora internationalisation priorities).
But 60 million Italian-speakers on Google, living in a teetering economy within the First World, are still a much more compelling proposition for would-be advertisers on Quora than 10 million Greek-speakers on Google, living in a collapsed economy, within whatever world Greece now finds itself in.
And that’s the calculation. If the calculation were Wikipedia-style altruism, there’d be a Quora in Arabic and in Hausa already.
Unlike others here, I would be delighted if there were a Quora in Greek; but then again, I’m in the diaspora, so I miss being immersed in Greek. German Quorans I know were ambivalent about the point of a German Quora too, but I note that while some will not set foot on it (Kat), others have taken it up despite their scepticism (Clarissa Lohr). The global reach of English Quora is unlikely to be diluted, and the Other-Language Quoras can readily occupy a niche alongside it.
(Niche is not what Quora likely had in mind for all those Googling users and their monetisable clickbait. It’ll be interesting to see how many eyeballs Spanish Quora attracts that weren’t already on English Quora.)
But a Greek Quora? Only if Quora Inc turns into Wikimedia, and releases its software for public tinkering and customisation.
Like I said. Του Αγίου Πούτσου.
Where does the Greek quote “βίᾳ ἤρχεσαν οἱ τριάκοντα τῶν Ἀθηναίων και τὸν δῆμον ἤδη κατελελύκεσαν” come from?
The quote as given does not appear in the Ancient canon, or even the Mediaeval canon. Nor in fact does the phrase βίᾳ ἤρχεσαν “they had ruled with force”.
The phrase is a little odd; it’s very much a tendentious summary of what happened in Athens with the Thirty Tyrants, which would be out of place in an historical account, though maybe not in rhetoric.
My strong suspicion is that this comes from a textbook.
Why are there so few forests on Crete island?
The forests of Crete were renowned, and were going strong even in Venetian times: Cretan Renaissance literature abounds with pastoral scenes, and tales of deer hunting.
These are the kinds of mountains I grew up seeing in Eastern Crete:
They do have shrubbery. But actual trees are long gone. The first time I saw trees on a mountain was on a visit to Cyprus, and they looked all wrong.
The story I’ve heard is that they were chopped down for firewood, and erosion did the rest. Google Books corroborates:
Many of the forests that were severely exploited recovered and indeed have been through several cycles of exploitation and recovery. For example, deforestation of Crete was a factor in the demise of the Minoan civilization in 1450 BC and yet cypress imported from Crete was used for the construction of the Venetian fleet in the Middle Ages. In the 16th century, the Idhi mountain range in Crete was cpvered in cypress; a century later it was described as a barren spot. The city of Iraklion is located near the site of ancient Knossos, the major city of Minoan Crete. In the 17th century AD, Iraklion repeated the deforestation of the ancient Minoans such that no more local supplies of firewood were available. […] Essentially deforestation all over the Mediterranean occured where populations increased and reforestation occurred where population decreased and people moved out of the area.