Category: Uncategorized

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Forestry in a Global Context:

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.