Category: Uncategorized

To quibble (and I’ve spoken about this before, as has others): Quora *does* support emojis, and does not (yet) have an explicit policy against them—only because it has made it hard for people to use them. If people do start using them, as Alexander Lee found with coloured lettering, the Policy Arm of Quora will surely spring into action.

See Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why doesn’t Quora allow the use of emoticons, when it would make the site more interactive?

If you want to make sense of English vowel pronunciation, Middle English phonology – Wikipedia is always a good place to start.

Do had a long ō. (As it still does, allowing for the Great English Vowel Shift.)

The Middle English 3rd person of do was dōeth, if the verb was a main verb, and dōth, if it was an auxiliary.

Long ō before a th normally became /uː/, as in sooth, booth; but it sometimes became /ʌ/, as in mōther, ōther. And dōth. (No, I don’t know what the rule was, if any.)

Does is a conventional spelling of dō-s replacing dō-th (evoking do-eth). As far as I can tell, a Middle English dōs could only have ended up pronounced as /duːz/: I doo, you doo, she dooz. The pronunciation of the oe in does, to rhyme with buzz, is clearly carried over from the o of dōth: the -th changed to -z only after the ō had changed to ʌ.

… Ah. I see Brian Collins’ answer to How come does is not pronounced as /doʊs/? is the same as I worked out.

Give to her joy, you callused world, give peace,
this lady who should never, ever cry.
Let it have air to bloom, roots to release,
this beauty which should never, ever die.

This smile, which neither coin nor bonds can buy,
let it be sheltered from the bondsman’s blame.
This heart so generous, this glance so wry,
let their reward be more than they can name.

Sleep now, my sweet, sleep while the world’s aflame.
There will be time to mourn it yet. Your hair
smoulders in auburn whorls, which none can tame.
Tomorrow, you’ll catch fire again and flare,

to stand your ground, and take what you deserve.
The stars fall at your feet, eager to serve.

Nothing as comprehensive or as well maintained, for the reasons given in Michael Chen’s answer: noone’s strongly motivated to reinvent NLTK when NLTK is already there.

There’s a list of projects at gopherdata/resources. There’s bits of what NLTK does among them.

What does fluency mean in a conlang like Klingon?

Actually “fluency” is something of a misnomer I committed. What does good style mean in a conlang like Klingon? People clearly do differentiate between good Klingon and bad Klingon; on what basis do they do so, when the language is made up, and we don’t have any utterances from its creator longer than a couple of lines of barked orders?

It would be a challenge to get a linguistics department to take it seriously. It would be even more of a challenge to get a literature department to take it seriously, and it would be the kind of thesis that could do with input from someone dealing with rhetoric (which linguists tend to think beneath them). But there’s a PhD in it, for sure. And it spans across mental models of style, and fads in English prose style, and translation theory; in fact, it reaches into the theory of aesthetics.

It’s the question that got me into linguistics, btw (in its Lojban iteration). And I sort of have an answer for it, as the answer linked shows. But it can be filled out a lot more than that.

Historically, the distinction between adjectives and nouns is a fairly recent one—not entrenched before the 18th century. The classical grammars referred to nominals, which included adjectives and nouns.

In addition, Greek, unlike English but like many other languages, can routinely use adjectives on their own without a noun. In fact, neuter adjectives were how Classical philosophers referred to abstractions: τὸ ἴσον, “the equal”, was how someone like Plato would refer to Equality.

There is only one way in which Ancient Greek adjectives differ morphologically from nouns. Feminine 1st declension nouns that are accented on the penult in the singular are accented on the penult in the plural: κινάρα ‘artichoke’, κινάραι ‘artichokes’. If a feminine adjective is accented on the penult in the singular, it is accented on the antepenult in the plural, by analogy with the masculine plural: δεύτερος, δευτέρα: δεύτεροι, δεύτεραι (not: δευτέραι).

With typical cluelessness, 19th century grammars say that ethnic names are an exception to the accentuation rule for nouns: Ῥοδία “Rhodian woman”, Ῥόδιαι “Rhodian women”, not the expected Ῥοδίαι. But of course, that isn’t an exception at all. That just shows you that to Ancient Greeks, Ῥόδιαι was not a noun but an adjective.

The claim, Googling tells me, comes from Homo Prospectus (2016), by Martin Seligman et al. Its programmatic claim is that:

Our species is misnamed. Though sapiens defines human beings as “wise” what humans do especially well is to prospect the future. We are homo prospectus.

If the title is to be more accurate, then we would need to concede that (a) humans are not necessarily more ‘wise’ than chimps or dolphins or crows, and more importantly (b) that what is distinctive about human intelligence is the ability to envision a future, a mental model of time.

The attribute that usually gets brought up as unique to human intelligence is self-awareness. Googling tells me that George Herbert Mead, at least, made much of awareness of the future as part of the human mind’s ability to reflect on its self, as a defining attribute of human intelligence. (https://books.google.com.au/book…)

So, maybe? At least one psychologist seems to have thought so. Animals do plan for the future; I gather it’s still controversial to what extent they have a mental model of the future.

And thanks for the vote of confidence in A2A’ing me, Rynnah. That was a lot of googling and guesswork. 🙂

It used to; the [j] was regularly dropped after certain consonants:

Phonological history of English consonant clusters – Wikipedia

The change of [ɪ] to [j] in these positions (as described above) produced some clusters which would have been difficult or impossible to pronounce; this led to what John Wells calls Early Yod Dropping, in which the [j] was elided in the following environments:

• After /ʃ, tʃ, dʒ/, for example chute /ʃuːt/, chew /tʃuː/, juice /dʒuːs/
• After /j/, for example yew /juː/ (compare [jɪʊ̯] in some conservative dialects)
• After /r/, for example rude /ruːd/
• After stop+/l/ clusters, for example blue /bluː/

Apparently Welsh and some other dialects kept [ju] as [ɪu], did not undergo yod dropping, and as a result they pronounce chews /tʃɪʊ̯z/ and choose /tʃuːz/ differently. I can’t tell from Wikipedia whether that extends to rude being pronounced as ree-ood.

If someone does not have the Message link on their profile, they have blocked messaging—which is their right. If you want to communicate with them, leave them a comment. Unless they’ve disabled those too, in which case, all you can do is move on.

For Modern Greek:

• parea ‘group of people hanging out socially’. Either our solitary Catalan loan, or one of our few Ladino loans, from parea (Spanish pareja) ‘couple’. The Catalan etymology is seductive, as it involves the Catalan Company, a parea marauding the Greek countryside.
• tsonta ‘porn film’. From Venetian zonta ‘joined on’ (Italian giunta); originally meant ‘freebie, lagniappe, baker’s dozen’. Which tells you a lot about Greek cinema practice in the 50s, and their male audiences.
• teknó ‘toyboy, twink’. From Romani tiknó ‘small child’, via Kaliarda, the Romani-based Greek gay secrecy language, influenced by Church Greek téknon ‘(spiritual) child’.
• varvatos ‘macho, manly’. From Latin barbatus ‘bearded’.
• glamouria ‘glamour (sarcastically), flashiness’. From English glamour (itself ultimately from Greek grammatikē via Scots), + the colloquial suffix –ja ‘a strike of something’.
• zamanfou ‘indifference, complacency’. From French je m’en fous ‘I don’t give a fuck’. Also zamanfoutistas ‘I don’t give a fuck-ist’, zamanfoutismos ‘I don’t give a fuck-ism’.