Category: Uncategorized

Get someone to write a scroll in Chinese calligraphy, with a culturally appropriate saying on how important teachers are. I’m seeing Chinese calligraphy offered at Upwork at $18/hr.

Been A2A’d, but alas, I went through the general linguistics programme 20 years ago, and I haven’t stayed in touch.

Some generalities:

• Melbourne Uni has the Language Testing Research Centre, which means that Language Testing is one of the core strengths of the department.
• The department also has three ESL specialists.
• The department includes Tim Macnamara, who is a reasonably big name, and Paul Gruba and Carsten Roever, who I have found affable and clever.
• The applied linguists and the theoretical linguists got yoked together 20 years ago, while I was there. The two halves didn’t have much to talk to each other about back then, and I doubt they do now either.
• Alastair Pennycook was in the applied program during my time. Alastair is a huge name in the politics of World Englishes. As far as I was concerned though, he was this odd Scotsman who would debate with me whether my teal jacket was blue or green.
• Melbourne Uni in general is a great place to study…
• … but it can be complacent on its laurels; do talk to people from other universities if you can.
• The MA in Applied Linguistics is coursework and minor thesis, and always has been. From the perspective of a PhD student in general linguistics, there were gajillions of you, you did a lot of coursework, and you weren’t as hippy and eccentric as we liked to think we were. Large overseas student representation among them.
• I’m saying that to indicate that I’m not really the right person to A2A. 🙂

I’m not proud to bring up puşt “bottom, male homosexual on the receiving end of anal sex, faggot”, because homophobia is not something to be proud of. But the word has certainly been productive in Greek, as you might expect of an insult.

From the Triantafyllidis Dictionary: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής

• pustis ‘faggot’ (used as insult; used as admiration of someone cunning; used as informal friendly address)
• Diminutives: pustraki, pustrakos
• Augmentatives: pustara, pustaros
• Feminine (used mostly of men): pustra
• pustario ‘group, collective of pustis’
• pustia ‘dishonourable conduct’
• Diminutive: pustitsa
• pustikos ‘adjective of pustis’
• Prefix:
• pustoɣeros ‘derogatory term for old man’
• pustoferno ‘to act like a pustis’

From SLANG.gr, omitting clearly nonce jocular coinings:

• pustrilikia, pustlukia (literally faggothoods, with Turkish suffix): ‘sexual insults’
• pustevo, pustrevo ‘to become gay; to become degenerate, effete’
• xepustevo (‘faggoting out’): ‘to cry out with joy in an effeminate manner’
• pustriði ‘insulting diminutive of pustis’
• pustarikos ‘affectionate diminutive of pustis, someone not fully sexually aware’ (portmanteau with pitsirikos ‘kid’)
• pustosini ‘gayness, gaydom’; deliberately grandiose-sounding, by analogy with ðesposini ‘majesty’, romiosini ‘Greekdom’
• pustraðiko ‘gay shop, gay establishment = Mykonos’
• Lots and lots of prefix instances; puštokalamaras ‘faggot penpusher’ deserves prominence as the default derogatory term Cypriot Greeks apply to Greece Greeks. (‘penpusher’, because they speak Official Greek as distinct from Cypriot dialect.)
• Lots and lots of suffix instances; e.g. xeftilopusta ‘laughing-stock pustis’, poniropustas ‘cunning pustis’, trambukopustas ‘thug pustis’
• If I can be allowed one jocular coinage from slang.gr: [h]eteropustas ‘metrosexual’

It follows the rules alright. They’re just rules that have nothing to do with the original Greek.

Traditional English pronunciation of Latin – Wikipedia

In the middle of a word, a vowel followed by more than one consonant is short, as in Hermippe /hərˈmɪpiː/ hər-MIP-ee, while a vowel with no following consonant is long.

Hence, Hĕrmīone. (Long and short as in Modern English spelling: long i = [aj].)

Endings: … The first class consists of vowels alone, i.e. -a, -e, -æ, -i, -o, -u, -y. In this class, the vowels are generally long, but -a is always /ə/.

Hence, Hĕrmīonē.

Latin stress is predictable. It falls on the penultimate syllable when that is “heavy“, and on the antepenultimate syllable when the penult is “light”. … A syllable is “light” if it ends in a single short vowel.

Hence, Hĕr-mī´-o-nē.

However, when a vowel is followed by a single consonant (or by a cluster of p, t, c/k plus l, r) and then another vowel, it gets more complicated.

• If the syllable is unstressed, it is open, and the vowel is often reduced to schwa.

Hence, Hĕr-mī´-ŏ–nē, [hɜɹˈmajəniː]. As opposed to the Ancient Greek [hermiónɛː], or the Modern Greek [ermiˈoni].

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. 🙂

Not quite “not worth living”. The Greek is more absolute than that.

I’ve been feeling guilty about Nick Nicholas’ answer to Since the active and middle voices of the 2nd aorist forms of “to stand” are intransitive (ἵστημι – ἔστην vs ἐστάμην), are these forms synonymous?, where I basically dismissed nuance in Ancient Greek as something transitory, and not to get too hung up about. The rendering of Plato’s maxim is an instance where there is a little bit of nuance, and I’m hijacking this question to do penance.

I could have done Sappho instead; her second best known poem, Aphrodite of the dappled throne, has Aphrodite repeat three times δηὖτε, which gets translated as ‘again’:

you, Blessed One,
with a smile on your unaging face
asking again what have I suffered
and why am I calling again

and in my wild heart what did I most wish
to happen to me: “Again whom must I persuade
back into the harness of your love?
Sappho, who wrongs you?

It doesn’t just mean ‘again’. It means ‘but now too’. It’s double-emphasised. You can see Aphrodite actually rolling her eyes: “what have you suffered THIS time, and why are you invoking me THIS time, and who do I have to persuade THIS time?”

But I’m alighting on Plato instead. So.

Ancient Greek has participles. It has oodles of participles. It has actives and middles and passives. It has future and past and progressive [present] and perfective.

And that’s not what Plato used. Plato used verbal adjectives.

There are two types of verbal adjective in Greek. The first ends in –teos, and corresponds to the Latin gerundive; it means ‘should be X-ed’. So zētēteon ‘should be sought’ is the term for a logical problem. erastea is someone who should be loved, corresponding to Latin Amanda.

So Plato could have used biōteos, ‘should be lived, is to be lived’. But he didn’t. He used biōtos: ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ, ho de anexetastos bios ou biōtos anthrōpōi. “But the unexamined life is not lived for a human.”

Biōtos, and for that matter anexetastos, are the second type of verbal adjective. They kind of mean the same thing as a passive participle. But a participle is still a verb: it has an agent, and it has a time, and it has an aspect. An adjective doesn’t: it just is.

So if you take the verb passō ‘to sprinkle, to salt’, you could say that fish is passomenos ‘being salted’, or pastheis ‘that was salted’ or pepasmenos ‘that has been salted’. But you don’t. You just say fish is pastos, ‘salted’. You don’t care when, you don’t care by who. In fact, the question of when or by who does not really even make sense; it’s an adjective, it just is.

When it’s negated, the notion of it being a state, and not an event, is even stronger. Anexetastos ‘unexamined’ is such a negated verbal adjective. It doesn’t mean ‘currently not being examined by someone’ (mē exetazomenos), or that it didn’t get examined (mē exetastheis); it’s just unexamined. Examination doesn’t happen around it.

In fact negative verbal adjectives connote so strongly that the event doesn’t happen, they are often translated into Latin and Western languages with adjectives indicating impossibility. ‘Indeclinable’ in Greek is aklitos, un-declined. Because it’s an adjective and not a participle, the notion of who does the declining does not even show up, and the notion of when the declining happens and whether it’s ongoing does not show up. It just is.

Same here. An anexetastos life is not a life that didn’t get examined by someone at some time. It just isn’t examined.

Same with biōtos. Plato doesn’t use biōteos, “shouldn’t be lived”, so a notion of ‘worth living’ isn’t there. He said it is not lived. Not by someone, at some time: it’s just not lived at all. Any more than a preposition is declined, or a whale is examined. In fact, abiōtos gets rendered as ‘unlivable’. LSJ translates it as “not to be lived, insupportable”; the implication is that the situation is no more able to sustain life than the lunar surface.

I mean, sure, ‘worth living’ is sometimes an appropriate rendering. Aristophanes in Plutus says Abiōton einai moi pepoiēke ton bion, “he’s made my life be unlivable”, and the expression has been revived in Modern Greek: mu ekane to vio avioto “he made my life unlivable”. (abiōtos had not survived in Modern Greek, but verbal adjectives have, so Greeks still have an intuitive understanding of the expression) In English, we would say “he made my life not worth living”. But the Greek is more absolute: “there’s no life to be had there”.

And Plato did not say abiōtos either. He went one step further: he said, not ‘unlivable’ (or ‘unlived’), but ‘not lived’ (or ‘not livable’): ou biōtos. It’s just that bit more emphatic.

What did Plato mean? The tone is all wrong, but it comes across as something like: “An unexamined life? That’s not living. For anyone.”

Of course there is.

This subject underwent extensive research by the now departed Laura Hale: Laura Hale’s answer to In what ways does the Indian Quora differ from the American Quora? Part of that research shows that Indians tend to follow other Indians, and engage with them, and Americans other Americans.

This is a tendency that is all to do with what people feel comfortable with. (Note Laura’s finding that Indians are likelier to follow Asian Americans than White Americans.) The two national communities of American and Indian users are large enough on Quora for this to be feasible; users from countries with smaller representation on Quora can’t do the same. Hence, Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why is the Indian community of Quora termed as “self-contained”?

To confirm what Alberto Yagos said:

• The best Princeton’s database of Byzantine translations has is Iamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras, or, Pythagoric life, which includes some sentences by Stobaeus.
• Here’s some bits translated online: The Gentle Exit ” Stobaeus Extracts Sentences and Precepts. By bits, I mean one paragraph.
• Here’s Roger Pearse, Patristic blogger, asking the question in 2010: Stobaeus, Florilegium, and getting a negative answer in 2017.
• A translation of Hermes Trismegistus is based heavily on Stobaeus: Thrice-Greatest Hermes
• This is a review of a translation of one extract of the Eclogues: Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2000.02.37.

The complete anthologies by Stobaeus, pretty clearly, have not been Englished.