A “Stay Safe Out There” to all of you.
Comments on this blog, as with the Necrologue, are being reported for BNBR infractions. Two commenters at How to Get Thousands of Leads from Quora in Five Months!!!! have been reported, and their comments deleted. And of course, the post itself got reported for BNBR.
A reminder to all blog readers and posters to BNBR. By Quora’s standards, rather than yours.
😐
This marks my 2500th answer. This have I achieved; this noone gets to take from me.
Although I am now embarking on some answer downloading.
Hate Quora moderation? They have their uses. They have their blind spots. They have their tone deafness, and they have their mission.
When I was coming down from my erstwhile anger about Quora, I said:
If Quora Moderation continues to be Moloch, and impassively and mutely receive burnt offerings… well, no point getting angry at Moloch. He’s just an oven.
After receiving two BNBRs in a day, I’ve gotten my answer count up to 2500; I’m downloading them; and I’m taking a couple of weeks’ break. I will be logging in to update the Necrologue, and maybe banter on the odd question, but I am withholding answers.
I’ll be back.
So will Moloch.
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.
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.
Fascinating question.
I mean, adjectives and nouns have declensions, and so do articles and pronouns. If an article is going to have a declension, better it have a declension that’s strongly associated with genders (since gender signalling is a core function of adjectives), than the third declension, which did not differentiate masculines and feminines. The first declension is feminine, with distinct-looking masculines as a late development in proto-Greek; the second declension is masculine/neuter, with feminines as an occasional exception. So they did correlate with gender strongly.
Of course, most pronouns share the alternation of first and second declension that adjectives have anyway; and the article originated as a pronoun.
There’s probably some Indo-European behind why so many pronouns decline that way, patterning with adjectives and indicating gender overtly; then again, the first declension was a late development in Indo-European.
Perfect? Maybe. But careful with your direction of causation. The first declension appeared probably a millennium before the articles did; the articles had the form they did because the declensions were a good match for gender, and that was something that happened in adjectives way beforehand.
Third declension adjectives do exist, and third declension nouns definitely exist; they don’t differentiate masculine and feminine, and there aren’t as many pronouns in the third declension. (Of course, τίς, τί ‘who’ is hardly an obscure pronoun.) By some criteria, I guess that makes them less perfect. By some, they’re rather more perfect…
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.
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