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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.

• They don’t hate robots at all, and in fact they for one welcome our new robot overlords. They admit that AI is not there yet, but think that AI + humans will do a better job than humans alone. Adam D’Angelo’s answer to Do you worry that AGI (artificial general intelligence) will obviate the need for a structured knowledge repository?
• They’re right…
• … but AI is even less there than they admit, as demonstrated by the daily fails of Quora bots.
• They’re cheap. Quora is after all a business, and one that still hasn’t returned profit (although it will: Scott Welch’s answer to When do you think Quora is going to end?.) A combination of bots and subcontractors is indeed cheaper than professionals, and more scalable than volunteer admins.
• Scalable is not the same as effective, of course…
• The Terminator is on track to becoming real, but I think climate change will get us first.
• In fact, I’ve already speculated that the Quora bots are there to give us a false sense of security about how little progress AI has made. 🙂

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.)

Is there like an ‘institute of ancient Greek texts’ that publishes our translated Greek books?

There are several of them, though they are private concerns (publishers) rather than government institutes. The Classical Greek canon is not in fact that big (Nick Nicholas’ answer to How much writing from ancient Greece is preserved? Is it a finite amount that someone could potentially read?), and publishers can set themselves the task of publishing the lot in translation, or more typically in bilingual editions. In English, as other answers have noted, the standard-bearer is Loeb from Harvard University Press, which is now available online for subscription. In French, it’s Les Belles Lettres. In Modern Greek, it’s Kaktos.

My former employer the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae did link ancient texts on its site to online translations into English where available; for canonical texts, they almost always were. The database of translations was never under my purview; feel free to bring any misalignments to their attention.

I caught a glimpse of it while channel-surfing.

My thoughts:

• Most of these reality shows are better in the original American: Dating Naked.
• I find something very trashy and mean about UK Reality TV in general, and this did not appear to be an exception. Once again, the contrast between the American and the UK take on the concept was illuminating.
• There was little in the way of prurient joy to be had from the show. The UK had destroyed any notion of naked bodies being sexy anyway, through Embarrassing Bodies. (More meanness disguised as a community service.)
• Useful experiment? Through Reality TV? Useful experiment in what can they possibly come up with next for a ratings hit, I guess.

To add some further nuances:

• When an interlocutor has finally understood something we’ve been hinting at—one of the contexts “Bingo!” is used in English—Greek uses α μπράβο! “Ah, well done”, with the emphasis on the “ah”. Kind of like “there you go”.
• More exasperated variants of “finally! at last!” (Dimitrios Michmizos’ answer) are έλεος! “Mercy!”, or its Turkish equivalent νισάφι < ınsaf.
• An expression of relief at something that has dragged on (which is the likeliest experience after a long installation) is ουφ! “phew!”, or αμάν πια! “alas already!”

This is kind of lame (and TV rather than movie), but I guess I had a sheltered upbringing, and I was just six.

1977 was the heyday of Alice Cooper. As a sophisticated adult, I can now appreciate the antics of Alice for what they were, and even stifle a yawn at them. But as an impressionable six-year-old, not so much.

The scene that scared me was nothing about Satan worship, or fans dismembering chickens. It was, of all things, an award show, at the end of which Alice saw fit to pull a gun. The host (was it Dionne Warwick?) shrieked, the credits rolled, and I was terrified that Mayhem had seemingly intruded on the propriety of Hollywood.

Yes, Michaelis Maus, I was already inhabiting The Matrix.

For a couple of years after, Alice Cooper was at the lead of my personal pantheon of hobgoblins. I was scared that he would break into my home and subject me to some unspeakable horror. (I don’t know what that horror would have been; singing School’s out for summer, I expect.) I went so far as to bow my head while in the toilet, convinced that that would prevent Alice from identifying me, and whisking me away to some sort of un-education camp.

I’m pretty sure you couldn’t pull that kind of stunt these days. It truly was a more innocent time.

Almost exclusively from blog readers PM’ing me or emailing me with information, as I request in the blog guidelines. For Quit notices, they are usually the people quitting themselves. Very rarely, I notice someone banned; a little more often, I notice a “why was X banned” question before it gets deleted.

I have no direct or indirect communication line from Quora itself, and I have received no communication from Quora since launching the blog (including a response to my question about whether they had a problem with it).